Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/08/20/michigan-health-chief-to-stand.html
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It’s important to understand that this was a different case of endangerment than the general Flint water problem (which is due to lead contamination). Legionella (the bacterium causing the disease) isn’t in general spread via drinking water – it is spread through inhalation of water droplets from air conditioning systems and the like that haven’t been properly cleaned. In particular, it appears that a hospital in Flint had a contaminated cooling system.
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involuntary? there’s at least a few other people who could be added to this case, the problem with manslaughter is you can’t conspire to do it.
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#firstworldproblems?
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Well, the US is a first world country. So yeah, sure. By definition all problems there are first world problems.
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Indeed 
This just isn’t what I expect first world problems to be.
Is Flint the only city in America to be dumped on from this great height; or is it the only one we hear about because of Michael Moore?
I vaguely remember hearing about some small town in the US that was used to dump Radioactive Waste. The sludge was dumping in to massive tanks, where is settled and formed a hard crust over its surface. This wouldn’t have been too bad; except that sludge generated gas, which, periodically blasted through the crust; spraying an aerosol of radioactive particles around the surrounding area. Eventually the tanks were fitted with huge paddles to stir the waste and prevent it crusting over. That’s the kind of crap I expect to hear out of the US.
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That is a pretty hotly disputed. https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/30/health/legionnaires-disease-flint-water-crisis-study/index.html
http://www.michiganradio.org/post/new-tests-raise-questions-about-source-legionnaires-disease-outbreak
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It is just the one you hear about. For example Cleveland schoolkids had higher blood lead levels than were seen in the Flint crisis until very recently. Flint made the news because it was an acute crisis with clear villains. The media does a great job of pretending to show the problem by picking case study and running with it. Chicago makes the news for their murder rate, but it is lower than is seen in many cities of the Great Lakes or down the Mississippi. As long as we keep up the narrative of one bad apple we don’t have to look at systematic changes.
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About damned time some people face some actual consequences for the crisis the State created in Flint. We have a gubernatorial election coming up. It’s the State AG against a establishment Democrat. The State AG has failed to properly prosecute the executive branch appointees/officials who caused the humanitarian disaster in Flint, and do hope that becomes one of the central pillars of the Democrat’s campaign.
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Detroit is no longer ‘first world’, it’s the vanguard of the post-first-world dystopia that late stage capitalism is bringing us to.
Zeroth world?
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My assumption is that you don’t live here?
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Yeah, I just know what I read in stories and posts, so my impressions certainly may be wrong. I did live there back in the 60’s though, during the race riots.
Children being poisoned by lead is a first world problem? Really? Children being poisoned by their fucking government? Really?
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I agree, but it would be nice if this would open up a larger discussion on these issues, where there are clear failures to live up to the standards of clean water and air.
And I’d argue that part of the reason Flint came to national attention was that activists in Flint made sure that it did. This absolutely needs to be a mass movement to bring attention to issues around environmental contamination outside of Flint.
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I think that there is a general perception skew based on how it actually it is. Granted, there are still a lot of areas that could fit that perception, but it’s undergoing a larger renewal (although many may also call it gentrification).
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Just no. Detroit is not second-world, third-world or whatever else you are trying to disparage it with. You have absolutely no idea how much development and redevelopment work is going on in Detroit right now.
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I just wish that plan for converting Detroit into a ring city surrounding a huge core of farmland had been attempted. I have an irrational fondness for the concept. (Irrational because I’ve literally spent no time at all thinking about how it could be accomplished or what the results would be, I just like my fantasy image of a ring city.)
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