What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City

Mona grew increasingly frustrated when she did not hear back from the Genesee County Health Department. She understood “how interconnected a child’s environment, education, and health are—and how poverty brings innumerable tox stressors that compound anything you’re treating, whether it’s asthma, allergies, diabetes, or lead exposure” (103). Local officials should be taking the possibility of lead poisoning from Flint’s drinking water more seriously.

Pediatricians are supposed to routinely take children’s blood samples to test for lead. However, blood-lead screening rates of children are low, in part because the CDC has relaxed its recommendations on kids having their lead levels tested. To Mona, this relaxation in policy was a mistake because pediatricians and scientists now know there are no safe lead levels for children. Accessing the screening data for children treated at Hurley was easy. Mona, however, needed a larger pool of blood lead data that included children from the whole county.

The Michigan health department collected these data through their Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. Dr. Mona sent a follow-up email to the Genesee County Health Department, but this time included an inquiry about accessing the county blood-lead data. To get advice on how to get the county health department to respond, Mona also emailed her mentor, Dean Sienko (Dean Dean), who had worked at the CDC and served as the chief medical officer for the state and county.