In the 16 months since they became aware of the deadly Legionnaires' disease outbreak in Flint, Mich., none of the government agencies in Genesee County have performed tests on the city's water supply to determine whether Legionella bacteria is present, according to The Detroit News.
Experts told The News this lack of testing has made it impossible to know the source of the more than 85 infections and nine deaths due to Legionella that have occurred in the intervening months. Timely testing could have determined whether the presence of the bacteria coincided with Flint's shift in water supply, which changed from Detroit's system to the Flint River and back after thousands of children developed lead poisoning from tainted river water.
Michigan's Department of Environmental Quality and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services both considered testing water samples from Flint in early 2015, but neither agency did, according to The News. Additionally, the Environmental Protection Agency published testing recommendations for the city's water, which were ignored by state and county agencies.
"MDEQ should have done such testing, especially after they were alerted to Legionella problems by the Genesee County Health Department," Marc Edwards, PhD, an investigator who sounded the alarm on lead poisoning in Flint early on, told The News. "Better yet, they should have allowed CDC to come in and do that testing for them."
In a summary of a meeting to explore the Legionella outbreak in Flint, Darren Lytle, acting chief of the Treatment Technology Evaluation Branch at the Cincinnati EPA, offered to test water samples from Flint, as the organization's lab had recently tested for the bacteria at two Ohio hospitals and was still equipped to do so, according to The News. However, an EPA spokeswoman told the paper that the EPA never received an official request from GeneseeCounty, the city of Flint or the state of Michigan to do so.
State officials cited CDC guidelines that do not recommend routine testing of municipal water for the presence of Legionella; however, state laboratories were in possession of a minimum of eight positive bacterial samples from patients that could have been analyzed and tested for DNA matches in environmental samples from Flint, according to The News.