CNN
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The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has denied a request from Milwaukee’s public health department for assistance in managing unsafe lead levels in the city’s public schools, citing the loss of its lead experts in mass firings last week across federal health agencies.
“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 National Center for Environmental Health/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry at the CDC, wrote late last week to Milwaukee officials, according to a letter obtained by CNN.
EpiAid is a CDC program providing a short-term loan of an officer from the public health agency’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, or EIS. These “disease detectives” are sent to state and local health departments to investigate urgent public health problems.
In Milwaukee’s case, the city requested the CDC’s help March 26 with the investigation of lead exposure in its public schools, after the health department identified hazardous levels of lead contamination in multiple school buildings. CNN reported last week that Milwaukee’s health commissioner, Dr. Michael Totoraitis, had been working with the CDC for two months to address the threat.
Lead is toxic to the brain, and no levels of exposure are considered safe. It can be present in buildings constructed before 1978, when it was still legal to use lead in paint.
On April 1 – the day about 10,000 federal health employees lost their jobs as part of a massive Reduction in Force across the US Department of Health and Human Services – Milwaukee officials received an email from a CDC epidemiologist telling them “my entire division was eliminated today,” apologizing that she wouldn’t be able to continue working with the city on the response and referring them to other points of contact within the agency.
“The new points of contact were essentially unable to say what level of support they would provide us moving forward,” Totoraitis told CNN at the time.
Two days later, asked about the cutting of the CDC’s lead poisoning prevention and surveillance branch, US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested that the program might be reinstated.
“There are some programs that were cut that are being reinstated, and I think that’s one of them,” he said April 3, noting that “there were a number of instances where … personnel that should not have been cut were cut.”
A spokesperson for HHS told CNN that day that “HHS is planning to continue the important work of the lead poisoning prevention and surveillance branch that works to eliminate childhood lead poisoning under the Administration for a Healthy America,” a newly created organization within the agency.
But that same evening, Milwaukee received the email from the CDC denying its EpiAid request.
“While we’re disappointed, [the Milwaukee Health Department]’s work has not stopped,” Caroline Reinwald, a spokesperson for the department, told CNN by email Friday. “This only underscores the importance of the role local public health plays in protecting communities – and the challenges we now face without federal expertise to call on.”
A spokesperson for HHS didn’t immediately return CNN’s request for comment. CBS News first reported that the CDC had denied the request.
Milwaukee’s health department, Reinwald said, “remains committed to moving this work forward and finding solutions locally.”