(COMMONDREAMS) — Michigan’s attorney general announced Wednesday that the head of the state’s health department and four others have been charged with involuntary manslaughter for their role in the years-long Flint water crisis.
What happens in Haiti doesn’t stay in Haiti. Sooner or later, it comes to places like Michigan’s Benton Harbor and Flint. Our destinies are linked. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish aristocrat who long puppeteered United States presidents from behind the curtains, has written: “America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America’s power, especially its capacity for military intimidation.” I concur.
Two outbreaks of Legionnaires disease in and around Flint, Michigan, have health officials looking into whether they were caused or at least affected by the ongoing water-contamination problem going on in that city.
The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services is investigating the outbreaks, in 2014 and 2015, which sickened 87 people and killed 10 in Genesee County. The sick ranged in age from 26 to 94, and fell ill between either June 6, 2014, to March 9, 2015, or May 4, 2015, to Oct. 29, 2015, the agency said.
The next time you’re thirsty, you might want to consider buying a bottle of water instead of sipping from a water fountain. It seems that these public drinking fountains do sometimes harbor unwanted germs and pathogens. [1]
