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Friday, September 22nd, 2017

Flint’s lead-poisoned water had a ‘horrifyingly large’ effect on fetal deaths, study finds

Author:     Christopher Ingraham
Source:     The Washington Post
Publication Date:     September 21 at 2:22 PM
 Link: Flint’s lead-poisoned water had a ‘horrifyingly large’ effect on fetal deaths, study finds
Stephan:   The thing about the media is it has a very short attention span and a very small percentage of deep investigators. Flint, Michigan for most people is yesterday's sad news. But the thing about stories like Flint and the trend it represents, is that just because the media spotlight moves on the situation that drew media attention in the first place does not. Now we are getting the deep story about Flint, and it is a horrifying example of this principle.

The Flint Water Plant tower is seen, Friday, Feb. 5, 2016 in Flint, Mich. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder on Friday defended how his office responded to an email flagging a potential link between a surge in Legionnaires’ disease and Flint’s water, saying an aide asked for further investigation but a state agency did not bring forward the issue again. Credit: AP Photo/Carlos Osorio

The fertility rate in Flint, Mich., dropped precipitously after the city decided to switch to lead-poisoned Flint River water in 2014, according to a new working paper.

That decline was primarily driven by what the authors call a “culling of the least healthy fetuses” resulting in a “horrifyingly large” increase in fetal deaths and miscarriages. The paper estimates that among the  babies conceived from November 2013 through March 2015, “between 198 and 276 more children would have been born had Flint not enacted the switch in water,” write health economists Daniel Grossman of West Virginia University and David Slusky of Kansas University.

In April 2014, Flint decided to draw its public water supply from the Flint River, a temporary measure intended […]

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