CDC can’t help MPS and Milwaukee Health Department with lead crisis

By Sam Schmitz, Emily Pofahl

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    MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (WISN) — The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention denied a request from Milwaukee’s public health department for helping to manage lead hazards in Milwaukee Public Schools.

The city of Milwaukee Health Department requested the CDC’s help March 26 with the investigation of lead exposure in Milwaukee Public Schools, after multiple schools tested positive for hazardous levels of lead contamination.

Sunday night, Dr. Michael Totoraitis, commissioner of the Milwaukee Health Department said the department was hoping for the CDC to help with Milwaukee’s’ lead crisis.

“It’s pretty hard to put into words,” Totoraitis said.

The CDC is blaming the loss of its lead experts because of mass firings from last week across federal health agencies.

“My entire division was eliminated today,” a CDC epidemiologist wrote to Milwaukee officials on April 1.

“I sincerely regret to inform you that due to the complete loss of our Lead Program, we will be unable to support you with this EpiAid request,” Aaron Bernstein, director of the Center for Environmental Health and of the CDC, said in a message to the city of Milwaukee officials two days later.

EpiAid is a CDC program that provides a short-term loan to an officer from the public health agency’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, or EIS. Those detectives are sent to state and local health departments to investigate urgent public health problems.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said the program could be reinstated.

“There are some programs that were cut that are being reinstated, and I think that’s one of them,” Kennedy Jr. said April 3 when asked about the cutting of the CDC’s lead poisoning prevention and surveillance branch. He also said that “there were a number of instances where personnel that should not have been cut were cut.”

WISN 12 News has reached out to the Milwaukee Health Department for comment on the CDC’s response, but has not heard back.

When asked about the CDC’s response, MPS responded with this statement to WISN 12 News on April 12. “The lead remediation work happening in MPS will require significant resources to ensure we are able to provide our students and families with the facilities they deserve. As we build our budget for the next academic year, we are committed to working with our Board of School Directors and our partners at the City, State, and Federal level to advocate for what is needed.”

MacCanon Brown Homeless Sanctuary hosts a free lead testing clinic for MPS students and children under 10 every 2nd and 4th Saturday of the month.

“Hopefully the CDC will see the importance of it and they will actually know how important it is for them to try to fund it,” said Katie Doss, the lead program coordinator at MacCanon Brown. “The health department, they can’t do it all alone. We live in a village for everyone. We all have to come together.”

As of April 11, three Milwaukee Public Schools are closed because of high levels of lead. Those schools are Starms Early Childhood Center, Fernwood Montessori and LaFollette School. They have remained temporarily closed while lead remediation continues.

Overall, Milwaukee health officials said lead issues affected seven schools this semester. Four MPS students have tested positive for lead poisoning in recent months.

There’s 156 active MPS schools, according to the school district’s website. The city of Milwaukee Health Department said in a letter to the National Center for Environmental Health that all but 11 of those were built before 1978, when commercial uses of lead-based paint were banned.

On April 3, MPS Superintendent Brenda Cassellius announced that Sean Kane is no longer serving as Milwaukee Public Schools’ senior director of facilities and maintenance. Cassellius announced that the director of home environmental health, Mikhail Mannan, will temporarily lead the facilities department to support lead hazard remediation and ensure school safety while a permanent replacement for Kane is sought.

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