Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha

Chelsea

By now, most people know the beginning of the story: In April 2014, the town of Flint, Michigan, switched its drinking water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River to save money. But the river water was more corrosive than the water from the lake, and the city did not add the right chemicals to the water to ensure the water was safe to drink by the time people turned on their taps.

Soon after the switch, the people of Flint started to worry. Their new water smelled bad, and it was the wrong color. They complained to the city, but their concerns were largely dismissed. A few months later, the city advised residents to boil their water to eliminate fecal and total coliform bacteria. They began adding more chlorine to the water to kill the bacteria and assured the people of Flint that the problem had been fixed.

Pediatrician Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha saw hundreds of Flint kids at her clinic. When worried parents asked whether the tap water was safe to drink, wash in, and cook with, she said yes. She had faith in the city and state public health authorities to protect Flint’s families. She didn’t yet know how wrong she was. “My naïve trust in the government—local, state, and national—had made a liar out of me,” she wrote later in the New York Times.

Then, one evening in the summer of 2015, over a glass of wine, a friend of Mona’s who had worked for the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington mentioned that because the city hadn’t treated the water with corrosion control, it probably contained lead. Mona hadn’t seen any symptoms of lead poisoning among her patients, but she knew that didn’t mean this dangerous neurotoxin wasn’t affecting Flint’s kids. The effect of lead on brain development could be devastating for children, leading to lower IQ rates and behavior problems. There is no safe level of lead in drinking water.

Her friend urged her to do her own studies on the blood lead levels of the children she saw in her clinic. When Mona looked at her patients’ blood lead numbers, her stomach dropped. Afraid to put them in an email, she asked her friend to meet her at the soccer field where her daughter was practicing that evening. She printed out the results and stuck them in her bag, and with her friend, she pored over the findings. The percentage of kids with elevated lead had increased dramatically after the water supply switch. Flint kids were being poisoned. In that moment, everything changed. “I was becoming something new—an activist, and a detective. Huddled there on Field 3 with Elin, I felt that my life was beginning to resemble an episode of ‘Scandal.’ ”

Mona reached out to the state health department, asking for their data. They refused. What she didn’t know until later was that they had already noticed a spike. Michigan authorities knew lead levels were surging in kids. And they did nothing.

Determined to advocate for her patients, she held a press conference to warn families to not drink or use the water, particularly for kids. She hoped that her findings would sound the alarm within every level of government, and that her willingness to share the raw data rather than waiting for it to be published in a peer-reviewed journal (a risky decision for a researcher) would underscore the urgency of her results. Instead, the state denied her claims and conclusions. Though it was painful, she pushed back, never doubting her methodology or her conviction that Flint’s kids had to come first. She knew all too well that she was witnessing not only a public health disaster but a failure of the democratic institutions that were supposed to protect the people of Flint.

Born in 1976, Mona grew up in Michigan, in the proverbial shadow of General Motors. She is the daughter of Iraqi immigrants who were afraid to return home after Saddam Hussein took power. She has always held fast to the principles of social justice and democracy that she believed were rooted in her family’s adopted country.

“What happened in Flint could happen elsewhere, as the push for austerity and a disdain for science are combined with antidemocratic measures like voter disenfranchisement, gerrymandering and state-appointed emergency managers. One of the lessons of Flint is that science and public health won’t save us without a functioning democracy.”

—DR. MONA HANNA-ATTISHA

Yet she knew that racism and generations of neglect had helped create the situation in Flint, a city that went from high per capita incomes, low unemployment rates, strong unions, good schools, and good public health indicators to the exact opposite in a matter of decades. By 2013, half of all black citizens in Michigan were living under emergency management control, compared to just 2 percent of the white population. The pattern was clear: Predominantly white state government officials had turned a blind eye to what was happening to Flint’s lower-income black residents. In 2011, the state-appointed emergency manager had taken control of the city away from the locally elected mayor, with a mandate of austerity to avoid bankruptcy. That mandate had led to the decision to switch water sources in the first place. In other words, without the state’s push for austerity measures, the Flint lead-poisoning crisis may never have happened.

A few weeks after Mona’s press conference, the state capitulated, switching Flint back to Great Lakes water, but the pipes had been corroded and new pipes were needed to ensure no lead found its way into the water. Flint was an unnecessary man-made disaster born out of greed and negligence. Without Mona’s activism and audacity, it could have taken even longer for the crisis to be discovered and for parents to be informed.

Today Mona is focused on raising funds for programs that mitigate the effects of lead and getting as many kids into those programs as possible. She shares her platform, lifting up the voices of others who embody hope and resilience in Flint—including Mari Copeny, “Little Miss Flint,” who has been working to address this crisis since she was eight years old.

I was honored to meet Mona in 2016, and am grateful to my friend Sarah Lewis, associate professor at Harvard of Art History and African American Studies, for including our conversation about Mona’s book and work in the Spring 2019 Vision & Justice convening. The issue of lead, painfully invisible to the naked eye and more painfully visible in its effects on kids’ brains, is an issue of justice.

I’m proud to call Mona a friend and role model; the lesson of her story resonates today as much as ever: When leaders deny science, disregard facts, and ignore the people they represent, the consequences are disastrous. In this moment when thousands of communities in the United States still have unsafe lead levels due to paint, plumbing, and industrial waste, none of us can be complacent.