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.
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.
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.
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.”
But that same evening, Milwaukee received the email from the CDC denying its EpiAid request.
Milwaukee’s health department, Reinwald said, “remains committed to moving this work forward and finding solutions locally.”
