For almost two years, the children in Flint, Michigan, were drinking lead.

The poisoning of drinking water in the city — a result of officials trying to save money by switching its water supply — finally received national attention this month, with President Barack Obama meeting the city's mayor on Tuesday and declaring a state of emergency, and Gov. Rick Snyder offering a full-throated apology for breaking the city's trust and failing to respond more quickly.

But the dramatic story may never have come to light if it hadn't been for Mona Hanna-Attisha, a 38-year-old children's doctor who, despite strong pushback from state officials, helped expose the contamination scandal.

See also: What you need to know to understand the Flint water crisis

Hanna-Attisha, a lifelong Michigander who leads the pediatric residency program at the Hurley Children's Hospital in Flint, has been widely credited for drawing attention to the city's ongoing water crisis now gripping Flint.

In September 2015, she and her team analyzed patients' blood and found high levels of lead. The lead, it turned out, had been seeping into the city's water supply for more than a year. The cause, it seemed, was highly corrosive water flowing through city plumbing, eating away at the pipes and letting lead leech into the water.

"We were hearing reports from the Virginia Tech group that there was lead in the water," Hanna-Attisha told her hometown newspaper, The Oakland Press. "When pediatricians hear about lead anywhere, we freak out."

The Flint River flows in downtown January 17, 2016 in Flint, Michigan. Image: Bill Pugliano

The Virginia Tech findings inspired Hanna-Attisha to do an analysis of her own. Using her hospital's records, she studied test results from more than 3,000 students in and around Flint and found that the number of Flint children with elevated levels of lead in their blood had nearly doubled — from 2.1 percent to 4 percent — since the city switched to a new water supply, the Detroit Free Press reported.

In some neighborhoods, she told The Oakland Press, the lead levels tripled.

"What we found was alarming, but not surprising, based on what we knew about the water," she said.

When the results came back, Hanna-Attisha didn't wait for a journal to publish her findings.

"We shared these results at a press conference, and you don't usually share research at press conferences," she said. "It's supposed to be shared in published medical journals, which now it is. But we had an ethical, moral, professional responsibility to alert our community about this crisis, this emergency."

Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, director of pediatric residency at Hurley Children's Hospital in Flint, Mich., works at her desk. Image: Roger Schneider/Associated Press

The early response was not kind. State officials, who until then had insisted the water was safe, initially tried to dismiss Hanna-Attisha's findings. A county official eventually pushed the state to double-check its numbers, which finally confirmed the doctor's findings.

Within days, state officials and the city's mayor held a press conference to address the tainted drinking water.

Standing near the back of the room beside the state spokesman who had tried to discredit her work, Hanna-Attisha recalled to the Press, he apologized.

Erin Brockovich herself, the then-legal assistant who helped win a multimillion settlement from a California utility in a 1993 groundwater contamination case, later praised Hanna-Attisha on Facebook for her work:

The best news I have heard yet for Flint - thank you, Dr. Mona, for leading the way in making sure our children and... Posted by Erin Brockovich on Wednesday, January 13, 2016

But vindicated and praised does not mean finished.

With its plumbing permanently damaged, Flint's water is still unsafe to drink. State and federal officials have declared a state of emergency. Gov. Rick Snyder sent the National Guard to distribute bottled water and water filters to residents. Critics of the government's response have called for Snyder's resignation and at least two lower-ranking officials have already quit. The cleanup cost — Snyder recently asked for $28.5 million from the state legislature to help Flint — is quickly ballooning.

And then there's the human price.

"What's so damning about lead poisoning is you see the problems forever," Hanna-Attisha told The Oakland Press. "It causes dropping your IQ. It causes behavioral problems. It has been directly linked to violent offenses. In five years, we're going to see more kids who need early education and special education. In 10 years, we're going to see more kids with behavioral problems like ADHD. In 15 years, we're going to have more kids with criminal justice issues."

In response, Hanna-Attisha and her colleagues have established the Flint Child Health & Development Fund, a charitable fund to collect donations for the Flint children's long-term needs.

"We don't see the illness of lead right now, we see the consequences over the entire life of the child through their adulthood," she told The Oakland Press. "Lead is a irreversible neurotoxin with a lifelong, multi-generational impact. And we just had a whole population exposed to it."