In the midst of crisis this message surfaced.
There's still so many mysteries surrounding the Flint water crisis. And here's certainly one of them.
Many of the confirmed pneumonia deaths in Genessee County during the height of the Flint lead-poisoning crisis, may actually have been undiagnosed Legionnaires' disease, reports Chastity Pratt Dawsey of Bridge Magazine. Officially, 12 people died and more than 100 were sickened from Legionnaires’ disease in Genesee County since the water crisis began in 2014.
But that number could actually be far greate, as Pratt Dawsey reports:
The death toll from pneumonia nearly doubled in Genesee County at the height of the Flint lead-poisoning crisis, supporting the suspicion among medical experts that many of these deaths were actually Legionnaires’ disease that went undiagnosed by hospital and local health officials.
The Michigan Health and Human Services Department has confirmed that 87 people died in the county from pneumonia in 2015. That follows 90 previously confirmed pneumonia deaths in 2014, the year state officials switched the source of Flint’s drinking water and improperly treated it, causing lead to leach from pipes into the water system.
The soaring number of pneumonia deaths over two years mark a dramatic rise from 53 deaths in 2013, representing the highest increase in the state and a sharp spike from previous years, before the water switch. The spike coincided with an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, a more deadly form of pneumonia that often goes undiagnosed and requires different medical treatment than more common forms of pneumonia.
Medical experts told Bridge it’s likely some portion of the deaths attributed to pneumonia were actually undiagnosed cases of Legionnaires’. There is no way to know how many, however, because neither McLaren Flint, a major hospital in Flint, nor county or state health officials ordered routine testing of pneumonia patients for Legionnaires’, even well after becoming aware of a Legionnaires’ outbreak in 2014.
