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Here's a very disturbing story about how the state of Michigan stayed silent for many months after concerns were raised that Legionnaires' disease was linked to the Flint water system. From April 2014 to November 2015, there were 87 confirmed cases of the disease in Genesee County. Nine of those people died.
It is a respiratory disease caused by Legionella bacteria that can infect the lungs.
In a special report spread across most of Friday's front page, Chad Livengood and Karen Bouffard of The Detroit News report:
At least six Environmental Protection Agency officials discussed in late March Genesee County’s Legionnaires’ disease outbreak and a suspected link to Flint’s change in water sources — and were told the state would alert the public.
No pronouncements about the outbreak were made then. Two months later, a Michigan health official’s email to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared “the outbreak is over.” The disease would kill four more people in the summer and fall and would not be brought to the public’s attention until the next year.
When the public was informed, the words came from Gov. Rick Snyder during a Jan. 13 press conference. Snyder maintained he had heard about the Legionnaires’ outbreak two days earlier.
Thomas Poy, the ground and drinking water branch chief of EPA Region 5, told those on the March phone call that “the state is currently figuring out a communication-with-the-public plan,” according to notes from Jennifer Crooks, the EPA’s Michigan drinking water program manager.
A trove of more than 24,000 pages of Flint-related documents among local, state and federal officials released by Snyder’s administration reveals EPA Midwest water experts held the March 26 conference call to discuss the Flint-area Legionnaires’ disease outbreak. Among those contributing was Region 5 water expert Miguel Del Toral, who at the time expressed concerns about the lack of corrosion controls and the likely risk of lead contamination in Flint’s drinking water.
The News' package of articles is based on "our deep dive into 24,000 pages of Flint records," Livengood tweets Friday morning.