By Carol D. Leonnig
The nation's premier public health agency knowingly used flawed data to
claim that high lead levels in the District's drinking water did not
pose a health risk to the public, a congressional investigation has
found. And, investigators determined, the agency has not publicized
more thorough internal research showing that the problem harmed
children across the city and continues to endanger thousands of D.C.
residents.
A House investigative subcommittee concludes that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
made "scientifically indefensible" claims in 2004 that high lead in the
water was not causing noticeable harm to the health of city residents.
As terrified District parents demanded explanations for the spike in
lead in their water, the CDC hurriedly published its calming analysis,
knowing that it relied on incomplete, misleading blood-test results
that played down the potential health impact, the investigation found.
The city utility says lead levels have been in the safe range in
D.C. water since 2006, after a chemical change to reduce lead leaching.
But the House report raises concerns about children in 9,100 residences
throughout the city with partial lead-pipe replacements. Their parents
may not know CDC research has found that children in such homes are
four times as likely to have elevated lead in their blood.
The House science and technology subcommittee investigation,
scheduled to be released Thursday, was spurred last year by one
scientist's research and Washington Post reporting
suggesting that the 2004 CDC analysis was missing many test results for
children who might have lead poisoning. With its final report, the
committee reveals that the missing data showed clear harm to children
from the water -- and that CDC authors knew the data was flawed. It
finds that CDC officials "failed in their public health duty."
Pediatric lead experts advise concerned parents to monitor their
children's behavior to determine whether they have noticed
coordination, hearing or mental-focus problems or changes. Parents who
witness such changes should have their children's blood tested for
lead.
Late Wednesday, the CDC declined to directly rebut the House
investigators' findings. Instead, it released a brief re-analysis based
on the missing tests, which it said confirms the original 2004 findings
that residents did not suffer significant harm.
The agency acknowledged, however, that its 2004 claim that no
children had been found with lead poisoning was "misleading," because
it referred to only one part of its study. Another part showed that
children living in homes serviced by a lead pipes were more than twice
as likely as other D.C. children to have unsafe lead in their blood.
Yanna Lambrinidou, head of a parents' activist group that formed in
the lead crisis, said the CDC, the city water utility, the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency and the D.C. Health Department knew
that lead was spiking in the water but did little to fix it or warn the
public.
"CDC gave the perpetrators of D.C.'s lead crisis a 'get out of jail
free' card," Lambrinidou said. "They will finally have to answer for
what they did."
When nearly 1 million residents throughout the District and in small
parts of Falls Church and Arlington learned from a Post article in
January 2004 that they had been exposed to unsafe lead in water for at
least a year, the CDC analysis was largely used to quiet public anger.
The study has since been cited as evidence that even astronomically
high lead levels are not cause for concern.
Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), the subcommittee chairman, said the CDC
report "left the public health community with the dangerous and wrong
impression that lead-contaminated water is safe for children to drink."
Lead is a toxic metal long known to cause brain damage and
developmental delays in fetuses and children when they or their
pregnant mothers ingest significant amounts.
Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech scientist who early on questioned the
paper, said it's time for the CDC to retract its findings and for the
senior author of the 2004 report, Mary Jean Brown, to resign.
The House subcommittee's investigation also chides the CDC for not
alerting the public to its subsequent research that contradicted its
earlier claims. This 2007 research determined a clear link between the
water problem and lead poisoning in D.C. children. For example, it
showed that city children with high levels of lead in their blood were
significantly more likely to live in homes with lead pipes, and after
the city fixed its water treatment problem, the CDC saw a "dramatic
reduction" in lead poisoning.
The committee also urged release of this research to alert residents
to a continuing, lurking threat in the estimated 9,100 D.C. homes where
water utility crews replaced part of the lead service pipe bringing
water to the house. The CDC study concluded that the D.C. Water and
Sewer Authority's $93 million effort to reduce lead risks after the
2004 lead crisis had largely backfired: Children living in homes with
partial lead pipe replacements were four times as likely to suffer from
unsafe levels of lead as those in homes without lead pipes.
The House science subcommittee reserves its strongest criticisms for
Brown, the CDC's director of lead poisoning prevention. She worked with
D.C. health officials to review blood-test results and frame the CDC's
response. Brown led a team in publishing the conclusion that the lead
problem wasn't having a serious health impact.
But the committee said it found evidence that Brown knew that the
D.C. Health Department data was missing thousands of blood-test results
in a critical period of the lead crisis. She told investigators that
she believed all the missing data was for low blood-lead levels, but
she never tried to obtain the original results to check.
The committee did go back to the labs for the original test results
for 2002-03 and learned that three times as many children had elevated
lead levels as reported, 954 instead of 315. This means child lead
poisoning was rising, not falling or staying the same, as the CDC had
claimed.
In one part of the 2004 report, the CDC paper analyzed the blood of
children and adults living with lead levels in their tap water 20 times
the amount raising concern -- and said not one was suffering from
elevated lead. Brown and her co-authors knew, however, that most of
those tested had been drinking bottled or filtered water before their
blood was analyzed.
A public health expert and co-author suggested to Brown in an e-mail
that the report mention this factor because "this may help to explain
why currently none of the persons have blood lead levels above the
level of concern." It was never mentioned.
Brown acknowledged to investigators that she "didn't have a lot of
confidence" in the results but didn't delay the report's release
because many federal agencies were pushing the CDC to publish.
In internal e-mails at the time, Brown expressed pleasure that the
drumbeat of media reports was easing. "Today has been the first day in
over a month that there wasn't a story on lead in water in the
Washington Post and also the first that I haven't been interviewed by
at least one news outlet," Brown wrote to her boss. "I guess that means
it worked!"
Washington Post