The doctor who discovered that the children of Flint, Michigan, were at risk of irreparable brain damage from lead poisoning in the city’s water supply has warned that the problem of “toxic soup” coming out of their household taps may have affected many more than originally thought.

All children under the age of six – between 8,000 and 9,000 of them – have been put in jeopardy by Flint’s contaminated water.

As many as 15% of those tested in certain city hotspots have shown dangerous levels of lead in their blood, according to Dr Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician at the local hospital who raised the alarm in the summer about metal in the water.

“This is an emergency. People think of disasters as being hurricanes, or tornadoes, or ice storms, but this is a disaster right here in Flint that is alarming and absolutely gut-wrenching,” Hanna-Attisha said on Wednesday.

The newly elected mayor of Flint, Karen Weaver, declared a state of emergency on Monday night,calling for federal assistance to deal with what she labeled a “manmade disaster”.

Flint switched its water supply from Lake Huron to the polluted local river in April 2014, immediately triggering widespread complaints of illness and protests.

City and state officials repeatedly declared the water was safe and refused to switch back to the safer lake supply until October 2015, shortly after Hanna-Attisha revealed that new tests showed alarming levels of lead in the blood of the city’s youngest children, at an age that makes them particularly vulnerable to such poisoning.

“We are assuming that the entire population of the city of Flint has been exposed, if you drank the water or cooked with the water. In fact, cooking with the water concentrates the lead levels,” Hanna-Attisha said.

In August 2015, Hanna-Attisha, who runs the pediatric residency program at the children’s hospital in the city’s large Hurley Medical Center, spoke with a friend who was a water quality expert and former worker at the Environmental Protection Agency.



The friend urged the doctor to test kids for lead.

Mayor Karen Weaver fields reporters’ questions after declaring a state of emergency on Tuesday. Photograph: Jay May/AP

She did and found that the proportion of children across a city sample who had blood lead levels in the danger zone had doubled from 2.1% before the switch to river water to 4% after.



In certain vulnerable city zip codes, the number had jumped from 2.5% to 6.3% with blood lead levels above five micrograms per deciliter – the amount officially described as “elevated” and of public health concern.

After Dr Hanna-Attisha told officials of the results of her testing, she was denigrated, but she persisted and, after much cross-checking, officials finally accepted her results and not long after, switched the water supply back again.

“Parents are traumatized. What was created here was a toxic soup,” said Hanna-Attisha.

But it took the election of a new mayor in November for an official crisis to be declared by the city authorities.

Hanna-Attisha said on Wednesday, however, that the news is even worse than first revealed.

She plans to publish the full results of her research in a medical journal before Christmas, but she revealed that certain “hotspots” in Flint have produced results that show that 15% of the children tested had elevated blood lead levels above five micrograms per deciliter.

Dr Mona Hanna-Attisha. Photograph: Doug Pike/Hurley Medical Center

Lead is only detectable in the blood for 30 days after exposure. So she said that many children may not have had elevated lead levels at the time of testing, but if they had been exposed previously, the damage could already have been done but remained undetected.

Children were tested at ages one and two, but one of the most dangerous periods for lead exposure is when a baby is in the womb and up to six months of age, she said.

“Our research underestimates the risk,” she said.

Hanna-Attisha said that parents in Flint should not panic, but the authorities need to provide extra resources for the city.

Any physical damage done by the lead cannot be undone, but its effects can be mitigated with good nutrition, extra educational stimulation for young children and, in future, extra support at school, Hanna-Attisha said. But, she added, “Flint is a food desert. There are no decent grocery stores. Poverty levels, crime and unemployment are extremely high.”

She is furious at the authorities, especially state environmental officials.

“There was just a sense of deny, deny, deny,” she said.

Residents of Flint are now suing the authorities in a lawsuit that local lawyers believe could end up as a $1bn class action.