Exclusive: Michigan Legionnaires' Deaths Were Preventable, Official Says
Source: CNN
By Sara Ganim, Linh Tran and Mallory Simon, CNN
Updated 1:22 AM ET, Sat February 13, 2016
Flint, Michigan (CNN)Residents of Flint, Michigan, began getting gravely ill and in some cases dying in summer 2014 in one of the worst outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease in U.S. history, and a county health director says attempts to find the source were hampered when the state wouldn't request federal assistance.
Genesee County Health director Jim Henry tells CNN in an exclusive interview he believes deaths could have been prevented, but the health department could not get help from the state of Michigan or the Centers for Disease Control to find the source. Eventually, 87 people got Legionnaire's and nine died.
Henry, who was a supervisor at the time of the outbreak, says state officials purposely kept the CDC away once the county wanted to look at the highly corrosive Flint River as the Legionnaire's uptick began. The state had decided to switch the water supply source to the Flint River, and soon brown water began flowing from taps in the city.
"We were suspecting the city of Flint water supply," Henry says. "That was the big red flag. Stickin' out like a sore thumb. We needed to check the water in that system."
Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/12/us/flint-michigan-legionnaires/
Feeling the Bern
(3,839 posts)And shame on you, Michigan for electing this POS
dem in texas
(2,674 posts)why aren't the citizens of Michigan demanding he resign? I read that he had considered running for President!
SamKnause
(13,108 posts)Judi Lynn
(160,545 posts)They are unworthy to serve, as everyone knows. They are simply too stupid, too corrupt, too greedy to get the job done. The only ones who benefit from them are other Republican grifters.
Marty McGraw
(1,024 posts)houston16revival
(953 posts)If 1982's Tip O'Neill came to symbolize a Congress supporting bloated
Welfare Queens, the idea of corporate greed and free market deregulation
and the damage those do are now at the forefront.
We really have to win the argument of what government does well in
regulating the economy, Wall Street, the environment.
We are in an ideological war between greed and regulation. We're still
not winning.
houston16revival
(953 posts)sure seem to adhere to the idea of "Get the Fed out!"
instead of get the lead out.
This mistrust of all the Federal government does has gone far enough,
it's reached the stage of acute paranoia in many instances, and it's not
universally applicable; the Feds obviously do many many good things
as well as some that make no sense. Being so rigid as to knee-jerk
everything the Feds do is pathologically stupid.
Brown water, btw, is highly likely acidic, which is what dissolves lead
pipes. The brown is iron - corrosion. Acidic water even if not containing
metals, isn't very good for you either.