Pediatrician Who Exposed Flint Water Crisis Shares Her ‘Story Of Resistance’
In August of 2015, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha was having a glass of wine in her kitchen with two friends, when one friend, a water expert, asked if she was aware of what was happening to the water in Flint, Mich.
Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician in Flint, knew that the city had changed its water source the previous year. Instead of channeling water from the Great Lakes, residents were now drinking water from the nearby Flint River. She had been aware of some problems with bacteria after the switch, but she thought everything had been cleared up.
Her friend warned otherwise: “She said, 'Mona, the water isn’t being treated properly. It’s missing something called corrosion control. … Without that corrosion control, there is going to be lead,’ ” Hanna-Attisha remembers.
The possibility that the city’s drinking water had been tainted by lead raised alarms in Hanna-Attisha; exposure to lead can result in long-term cognitive and behavioral problems, especially in children.
As Hanna-Attisha began reviewing her patients’ medical record, she noticed that the percentage of children with elevated lead levels had increased after the water switch. But when she shared her data at a hospital press conference, government officials tried to discredit her.
“The state said that I was an unfortunate researcher, that I was causing near hysteria, that I was splicing and dicing numbers,” Hanna-Attisha says. “It’s very difficult when you are presenting science and facts and numbers to have the state say that you are wrong.”
But Hanna-Attisha refused to give up. Instead, she spearheaded efforts to publicize and address the water crisis in Flint. She writes about her experiences in the book What the Eyes Don’t See.
“This is a story of resistance, of activism, of citizen action, of waking up and opening your eyes and making a difference in our community,” she says. “I wrote this book to share the terrible lessons that happened in Flint, but more importantly, I wrote this book to share the incredible work that we did, hand-in-hand with our community, to make our community care about our children.”
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