No One Has the Data to Prevent the Next Flint

Jim WEST/REPORT DIGITAL-REA/Redux

You have no real way of knowing if your town, your family, or your children face the kind of water contamination that exposed everyone in Flint, Michigan, to lead poisoning. Not because Flint is an outlier — it may, in fact, be the norm — but because no one has enough data to say for sure.

Five state and local officials in Flint face involuntary manslaughter charges for failing to alert the public to the looming health crisis there. Yet a recent Reuters report found 3,000 geographic areas in the US with lead poisoning rates twice that of Flint. But you would be hard-pressed to determine whether you lived in one of them because the United States lacks the data—and data collection requirements—needed to know for sure whether people are being poisoned by their drinking water. President Trump’s proposed cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency could make it even harder to know. “The data gaps are so huge. It is abominable. We have a huge number of people in this country living completely in the dark,” says Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist at Harvard University’s Chan School of Public Health and founder of the public health website ToxinAlert.org. Some 170,000 […]

Full article: No One Has the Data to Prevent the Next Flint