Wednesday, March 8, 2023

Fllint's Water and Endless Outrage

Depressing:

This is very sad: Marc Edwards, the Virginia Tech professor who first exposed toxic levels of lead in the water supply of Flint, Michigan, was initially a hero to the Flint community. Thanks to him, Flint became the target of nationwide outrage, and steps were finally taken to reconnect Flint to the (safe) Detroit water supply. In less than a year, lead levels in Flint water had dropped to safe levels.

So what did Edwards do? Well, he’s a scientist, and just as he had honestly exposed Flint’s problems in the first place, he also continued to honestly report the results of the intervention. When the water was once again safe, he said so—and that turned him from a hero into a pariah.

We've been through this before with dangerous contaminants that you can't see, taste, or smell: once people become afraid of them, they find it very hard to let go of that fear. And in this strange political moment, anyone who finds a reason to be outraged absolutely refuses to let go of that. It's as if we horde our anger as our most valuable possession. By August 2016, Edwards was saying publicly that Flint's water was safe:

But that narrative contradicted the perspective of advocates and groups such as Water Defense, an environmental nonprofit started by actor Mark Ruffalo, which brought in its own expert to sample the water in Flint….Edwards’s tests continued to show that contaminant levels had dropped. In September 2017, his findings were in line with the state’s, showing lead levels within federal regulations….The state had been providing residents with bottled water for drinking, but Edwards maintained they could also drink out of the tap again if they used filters, and that unfiltered water was safe to bathe in.

….Some residents, however, heard something else in Edwards’s conclusions. Abel Delgado, a Flint resident and activist who signed the letter criticizing the professor, says that he and others felt betrayed when Edwards seemed to imply the crisis was over. The professor appeared to be “giving in to the narrative of the state, and not the narrative that Flint was facing,” he says….Lawrence Reynolds, a pediatrician in Flint and a member of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s Flint Water Advisory Task Force, says Edwards was “irresponsible” to tell residents that they no longer had to worry about the water.

"Irresponsible" to report the findings of science. And let me tell you, they were testing the heck out of Flint's water by then.

But wait, it gets worse. While the amount of lead in Flint's water was in violation of US safety standards and at a level most experts consider unsafe, the amount of lead in the blood of Flint's children never got especially high. It was always lower than the average level in Detroit, for example, where the water is fine but there is all sort of lead in paint, soil, and other places. But now Flint is experiencing a rise in the number of students in special education, and the amount of disruptive behavior reported by special education teachers. Studies have not found any corrolation between the students being placed in special ed and their exposure to lead.

The scientists who studied this seem to be baffled, and they suggest that it was caused by a nocebo effect. (That's the opposition of placebo, that is, something you think will hurt you does hurt you.)

A nocebo effect is consistent with the trend of rising special education enrollment after the [Flint water crisis] was exposed. As a top news story of 2016, the crisis engendered negative psychological effects described by residents as “Flint fatigue,” and the surrounding international media coverage has continued for over five years with negative headlines. The news reports and their popularity on social media and negative perceptions of Flint community leaders and parents could have heightened negative expectations about the effects on children, who readily accept and act on information from those they trust.

So not only is all the alarm about water in Flint no longer necessary, it is actively harming children.

I suspect this is only one example of many harms done by our need to feel persecuted and angry about it.

3 comments:

G. Verloren said...

I think you've got a very strange take here.

When the government lies about a horrific and lethal problem that the government itself is directly responsible for, people stop trusting that government. That's not somehow "this strange political moment we're in", that's just the basics of breaking one of the highest levels of trust people can possibly have in you - their trust in you to protect their very lives.

This is not remotely new. Look at the utterly monstrous Tuskegee Study, started in 1932 and continued for FORTY YEARS. Government agencies ostensibly devoted to the health and safety of the population intentionally infected at-risk poor Black people with a hideous crippling disease without their knowledge or consent, and then covered it up.

It doesn't matter that the government stopped secretly infecting people with syphilis to serve as guinea pigs for the state in a twisted Mengele-esque experiment.

It doesn't matter that if you "followed the science" in 1973, a year after they had finally shut down the study, you would have found zero risk of the government secretly infecting you with a highly transmissible and frequently lethal (especially when untreated because of diagnosis) STD.

It doesn't matter that the government decided to put an end to the study - as they only did so in direct response to journalists investigating, discovering, and leaking the truth to the public, causing a public uproar which forced the government to stop a program they had no intention of ending otherwise.

The government, under the guise of seeking to help people medically, knowingly and intentionally secretly spread a disease that killed 128 men, spread the disease to 40 women married to those men, and caused 19 children to be born with congenital syphilis.

You don't get to be shocked or offended at people if they never again in their entire lives trust the government's word. You don't get to write them off as "hysterical" or "science deniers" because they don't instantly get over their victimization once the victimization comes to an end. You don't get to complain about how hard it is to convince them that they're actually safe now, and that they reflexively refuse to trust you even when you tell the truth.

When the boy who cries wolf gets caught, he doesn't get to whine and moan about how unfair it is that no one trusts him anymore despite the fact that he stopped lying. Particularly when he was actually the one viciously ripping apart and devouring his own flock in the first place.

G. Verloren said...

People are going to remember Flint - for the rest of their lives.

People are going to assume the government is lying to them - for the rest of their lives.

People are going to assume anyone and anything that supports the government message, no matter how true any of it actually is, is lying - for the rest of their lives.

That's just what happens when the people you trust to protect you secretly are responsible for killing you. They are NEVER getting that trust back, EVER.

That's ESPECIALLY what happens when the people being killed are chiefly poor Black citizens, and the people knowingly causing their deaths (for no reason other than to line their own pockets) are chiefly affluent White politicians and businessmen.

Neale Monks said...

Usually a reader if your (excellent) blog, not a commenter -- but G. Verloren is a hundred, million, percent right.

This is one of those times where the view from the ivory tower of academia must be very different from those on the ground. These people were lied to by their government. Repeatedly. Once that trust is lost, it takes effort to restore it, and likely across very many years. You don't get to turn around and say, "problem all fixed up now" and hope things go back to normal -- even if they have gone back to normal. You need to go above and beyond that, and work, hard, at convincing people that you can be trusted again.

That's the problem here. Not that Flint residents can't read reports on the chemical composition of their water or scientific papers about the 'nocebo effect'.

Imagine a guy who cheats on his wife. She finds out. She's open to saving their marriage. Is it sufficient for the guy to just stop seeing his mistress? Or does he have to do more than that to earn her trust back?

That's where we're at.