about mona

Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha is a pediatrician, public health researcher, activist, and author. She is a professor at Michigan State University and sees patients at Hurley Children's Hospital in Flint, Michigan. Mona is famous for uncovering a public health crisis concerning lead contamination of the drinking water in Flint and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. She was born in Sheffield, England, after her family emigrated from Iraq just a few years before to get away from an increasingly repressive political regime. When she was four years old, they moved to Michigan's Upper Peninsula after her dad got a job at Michigan Tech University. She's lived in Michigan ever since. Mona describes her childhood self as "loud, stubborn, talkative, social, and curious". Both of her parents were scientists and she was raised with a love of math and the natural world. She had a love of learning in general, and threw herself into activities in high school--sports, clubs, plays and musicals, she wanted to try it all! One of the things that she was most passionate about was environmental activism, and she was a key member of her school's environmental club. Now, when she's not working, she likes reading, doing puzzles, napping, and watching her kids' sports games.

What does Mona study?

In addition to seeing her pediatric patients, Mona is also a public health researcher and advocate. Public health is a field of study that tries to identify causes and solutions for health issues on a population level. Physicians largely treat individuals once they are already sick--public health researchers try to figure out what makes people sick and implement solutions to prevent more illness. Both approaches are important and are used in tandem to promote a healthy society.

Many of Mona's patients at Hurley Children's Hospital have experienced at least one toxic stress, and many of them experience multiple toxic stresses over the course of their childhood. The impacts of toxic stresses can be cumulative, and can even impact life expectancy. The life expectancy in Flint is 15 years less than in adjacent zip codes and the toxic stresses endured by its children is one thing that contributes to this disparity. In August 2015, with the help of some friends, Mona discovered a new and profoundly impactful toxic stress, one that was likely to be affecting many of her patients--lead in the drinking water.

About a year and a half earlier, in an attempt to save money amidst budget cuts and financial stress, the city of Flint decided to change it's water source. They switched from Lake Huron, which was pumped and sold to Flint by Detroit, to the Flint River. The Flint River was notorious for being heavily impacted by industrial pollution--it had even caught on fire twice before the 1972 Clean Water Act. While it had been cleaned up substantially, there were still many worries about whether it was safe to drink. Despite this, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) assured the public that the water was harmless and they were following all the right procedures to treat it.

Unfortunately, that was far from the truth. The water that Flint had previously gotten from Detroit was pre-treated and already safe to drink by the time it arrived in Flint, but the water from the Flint River was not. What's more, Flint's water treatment plant was out of date and not prepared to treat the water. In another attempt to save money, the city opted not to fully treat the water because it would have involved updates to the treatment plant. A critical omission from the treatment process was something called an anti-corrosion chemical. Many pipes in cities across America contain lead, and since water is naturally corrosive, the US made a law that requires cities to add chemicals to their water that prevent lead from leaching out of the pipes and into the drinking water and make it safe to drink. Flint did not add any of these chemicals, even though they were required to by federal law.

Lead is a heavy metal, and while some heavy metals like zinc and iron are important for human health in small amounts, most of them are toxic in higher quantities. When it comes to lead, there is no safe amount. Lead poisoning is often referred to as a silent epidemic because the symptoms can take a while to show up. Exposure to lead is particularly dangerous for children, as it disrupts normal brain development. Lead exposure has a wide range of impacts, including but not limited to loss of appetite, sleep issues, kidney damage, headaches, vision and hearing loss, memory issues, a drop in IQ, mood disorders, and aggressive behavior.

When Mona found out about the lead in Flint's tap water, she immediately reached out to MDEQ and other agencies who she thought would be able to help. She also started urging her patients and their families to drink bottled water, especially for infant formula. She was shocked and disappointed when MDEQ did not respond to her messages and, when they did, seemed to dismiss her concerns, saying that there was no problem with the water.

Mona knew that if lead was in the water--and test after test and showed that it was--that it would already be affecting her patients. But to convince the people in power to take action, she knew she needed hard evidence that the switch to the Flint River was causing elevated blood lead levels. Mona asked some data experts at her hospital for help, and together they pored over blood test results from their patients. They had to be very thoughtful about how to analyze this data: How should they break up the time periods (before and after the water switch)? Should they leave out patients who had other known sources of lead exposure, like a gunshot wound or lead paint in their house? Should they have an age cut off? After many iterations of data analysis, they had what they were looking for. In their mind, indisputable evidence: compared to the time period before the water switch, children in Flint now had significantly elevated blood lead levels.

Even though Mona had strong evidence, when she shared her data at a press conference, government officials and her own university immediately discredited her. They accused her of manipulating the data and trying to cause hysteria. Mona was not discouraged, though, and continued to make her voice heard. She knew that, eventually, science would come out on top of political interests. Eventually, people started to believe her and the true scale of the crisis was uncovered and made known to the public.

Now, things are starting to change and with legislation like the recent infrastructure bills, cities like Flint have money to change out their old lead pipes, but it's a long process and there is still a lot of work to be done to ensure health equity for kids in Flint and beyond.