There are too many Flints -By Hillary Clinton [View all]

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http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/there-are-too-many-flints

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What’s happening in Flint today happened 10 years ago in predominantly low-income, African-American and Latino areas of Washington, D.C. Lead leached into the water there for four years. In high-risk neighborhoods, the number of toddlers and infants with lead poisoning more than doubled.

In Baltimore, families have received settlements for the lifelong health effects of childhood lead poisoning. And now private companies are going around getting people, many of whom are permanently disabled, to sign away hundreds of thousands of dollars in future payments in exchange for a few thousand dollars right away. It’s an outright abuse of vulnerable people who have been hurt too many times already.

Near San Francisco, where housing prices have skyrocketed, many low-income families live in more-affordable Richmond, California. Richmond is 26 percent African-American and 40 percent Latino, and the housing prices are low for a reason—because the city is surrounded by oil refineries, chemical companies and eight Superfund sites. It’s no surprise that the city has the highest hospitalization rate for asthma in all of Contra Costa County.

Twenty seven schools are within 1 mile of a high-risk chemical facility in the Manchester neighborhood of Houston — a neighborhood that is 85 percent Latino. In Manchester, rates of childhood leukemia, asthma and bronchitis are all above average. The children who go to public schools there are 56 percent more likely to get leukemia than kids who live 10 miles away.

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