Latest news with #MilwaukeeHealthDepartment
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
LaFollette Elementary becomes 7th school cleared of lead dangers, according to MPS
LaFollette Elementary School has been cleared of dangers caused by lead paint, Milwaukee Public Schools announced June 11. It's the seventh school to have passed recent inspections for lead hazards by the City of Milwaukee Health Department. LaFollette school was constructed in 1897, making it among the oldest in MPS. An inspection in March found the building had dangerous levels of chipping paint and dust where young children could potentially ingest it, creating a poisoning hazard. More than 1,000 children in Milwaukee each year are poisoned by lead, mostly due to paint in older houses, according to the city. But a widespread lack of lead paint maintenance in MPS schools came to light in early 2025 after city health officials announced a child had been poisoned by lead paint at Golda Meir Lower Campus. LaFollette was among the early batch of six schools that closed temporarily this spring so lead hazards could be remediated. Closures affected about 1,800 MPS students. In closing March 17, LaFollette's 216 students in kindergarten through eighth grade transitioned to the Wisconsin Conservatory of Lifelong Learning. They will remain there until the end of the school year on Friday, June 13 — about 13 weeks since the initial closure. MPS said that this summer, it will remediate lead paint in all schools built before 1950 that also educate elementary-age kids. It will do the same in schools built between 1950 and 1978 by the end of the calendar year. 'I'm grateful to the LaFollette School community for their continued partnership and patience as we undertook this important work,' Superintendent Brenda Cassellius said in a statement. 'A disruption like this one is never easy, but this school community navigated it with the best interests of students at the forefront. I'm glad we are making good progress on our lead stabilization efforts in our school buildings, guided by our Lead Action Plan. Our students and families deserve school buildings that are safe and welcoming.' According to an inspection report, 50% or more of painted surfaces at LaFollette were found to be deteriorating. "Heavy" levels of paint dust were found throughout the building, the report said. Chipping and peeling paint was found in classrooms with kindergarten-age children and children with disabilities, and in cafeteria areas, the report said. The inspection report also noted signs of disturbed asbestos, which pose "notable health (risks) to both adults & children)." MPS spokesperson Stephen Davis said that, during the March inspection at LaFollette, two potential asbestos-related issues were found: deteriorating plaster in a few areas and the end of the asbestos-containing pipe insulation was exposed and uncovered. The Environmental Protection Agency and Milwaukee Health Department were told the deteriorating plaster was not asbestos-containing, according to historical sample results. In addressing the issue with the pipe insulation, MPS' Environmental Health Services put in an emergency work order to seal the small section of pipe; that work was completed March 17. The pipe's wrapping was repaired to maintain the covering. No asbestos was removed. "The repaired canvas covering maintains the asbestos in a safe manner," Davis said. For LaFollette and all other MPS facilities that follow the EPA's Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act regulation, the district has an asbestos management plan in place to manage and address any maintenance and repair requests. That plan has been in place since the 1980s, he said. MPS also conducts re-inspections to assess the condition of asbestos-containing materials in each school every three years, as required by the EPA. Every six months between reinspections, the school's building engineer checks the building to ensure the asbestos-containing material within the building is undamaged, Davis said. Any damage identified during a three-year reinspection or six-month building check gets immediately fixed through the MPS work order system. Cleo Krejci covers K-12 education and workforce development as a Report For America corps member based at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Contact her at CKrejci@ or follow her on Twitter @_CleoKrejci. For more information about Report for America, visit This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: 128-year-old LaFollette Elementary School abated for lead, MPS says,
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
‘Come and help us': Milwaukee parents fire back at Trump administration for denying federal aid amid lead crisis in schools
The library at Starms Discovery Learning Center has cheerful peach and blue walls, and squat wooden shelves filled with books wrapped in thick plastic jackets to protect them from the touches and smudges of many small hands. On Monday, the library became a place to exchange other stories, too – darker stories. These were stories of stressed mothers and anxious kids, of graduating fifth-graders missing out on end-of-year celebrations. The stories were about families with a dangerous toxin – lead – in their homes and now in their public schools. Those families shared stories about brain damage and learning disabilities, and about a federal government that has denied them help. 'I am here to elevate your stories,' said Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Madison who is the junior senator from Wisconsin. Baldwin, flanked by officials from the city's health department and school district, had come to Starms to meet with families and community activists and to hear more about their lives since the discovery that a child had been poisoned by peeling lead paint in one of the city's aging and poorly maintained school buildings. The city's health department ordered the school district to remediate the hazard, but the scope of the problem turned out to be much larger than a single building. So far, the district has closed six schools for cleaning and repainting, displacing roughly 1,800 students. Over the summer, the district's efforts will kick into high gear. It has a goal of visually inspecting all school buildings by September 1. The district, which is the largest in Wisconsin, has 144 buildings. All but 11 were built before 1978, when it was still legal to use lead in paint. The average age of an MPS school is 82 years. A few blocks away, Starms Early Childhood Center, the sister campus to the elementary school, is one of four that remains closed. It was built in 1893 and its preschool and kindergarten students and their teachers were moved into the elementary school. Though the city has cleared the building to reopen, many families said they'd prefer to remain where they were through the end of the school year to minimize further disruptions. Friday is district's last day before summer break. Several students in the district have been found to have elevated levels of lead in their blood. One case has been definitively linked to deteriorating paint in the basement of a school building, Golda Meir elementary. Two other cases involved students at Trowbridge and Kagel schools. Investigations determined that the source of the lead was most likely a combination of exposures from home and school. Other cases have been investigated and the schools were cleared as the source, said Caroline Reinwald, a spokesperson for the Milwaukee Health Department. Since the crisis started, Reinwald said, about 550 children have been screened for lead at clinics run by the health department and Novir, a company hired by the city to assist with screening. That doesn't include kids who might have been tested through their primary care doctors. 'We need to test many more kids for lead,' Milwaukee Health Commissioner Dr. Michael Totoraitis said on Monday. The City of Milwaukee Health Department had been working with experts in the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Branch when the entire team was laid off in the federal government's Reduction in Force cuts in April. The city had requested that the CDC dispatch disease detectives to help mount a wide-scale blood testing campaign of kids in city schools. That request was also denied, citing the agency's loss of its lead experts. Families who attended the meeting with Baldwin said they were outraged by the Trump administration's apparent lack of support or interest. 'We need our children to be protected right now,' said Tikiya Frazier, who has nieces and nephews at two of the closed schools. 'We need them to understand that and come and help us. This is a state of emergency for us.' On Monday, Baldwin issued an open invitation to US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to visit Milwaukee to see and hear the issues for himself. She has twice before pressed Kennedy about the denial of federal aid. Both times he gave mollifying answers. 'Do you mean to eliminate this branch at the CDC?' Baldwin asked him in a hearing in May. 'No, we do not,' Kennedy responded. But he has yet to reinstate the fired experts or reopen the lead program under his planned Administration for a Healthy America. He's also given no timeline for when federal lead poisoning prevention activities might continue. When Baldwin asked Kennedy about Milwaukee's situation in a budget hearing a week later, he responded that 'We have a team in Milwaukee.' The team was a lab technician who had briefly come to help calibrate a machine in the city's public health lab. Although the city had requested and needed that help for years, officials said it was not the work they had recently asked the CDC to tackle: helping get more kids' blood tested for lead exposure. 'Either he was lying, or he didn't know what was happening in his own agency. Either one is unacceptable,' Baldwin said after Monday's meeting. Kennedy has also failed to respond to a letter that Baldwin and US Rep. Gwen Moore sent in April, urging him to reinstate the CDC's lead team. On Tuesday, Baldwin and her colleague, Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, sent Kennedy another letter with detailed questions about the fate of the Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. They gave him until June 16 to respond. 'We've got to hold the Trump administration accountable,' Baldwin said. 'They could make the situation better today by rehiring these experts.' CNN reached out to HHS and the White House with questions about their plans for the Lead Poisoning Prevention Program and to get the administration's response to Milwaukee parents. HHS did not respond by CNN's deadline. 'I'm angry because Wisconsin is always there for other states,' said Koa Branch, who has four children in Milwaukee's public schools. When the tap water in Flint, Michigan, tested positive for high levels of lead a decade ago, Branch said, she remembers community members packing up food and supplies and going for support. But now, 'where's our help? Where's help for us?' Branch had two sons at Westside Academy when it closed in early May. She was notified via a newsletter sent home with her children and later a phone call. 'My anxiety hit the roof,' she said. The school district relocated classes to Andrew Douglas Middle School, about 3 miles away, or gave students the option to take classes online. Branch says her easygoing 5-year-old, Jonas, took things in stride, but her sensitive fourth-grader Jerell, 10, couldn't handle the change. 'I had to make a choice. I had to separate the two,' Branch said. Jonas moved with his class and teacher to the new campus, while Jarrell took classes online after Branch got home from work at night. 'I can't speak for everybody else, but it stressed my household,' she said. Branch said her kids have a vigilant pediatrician who has tested them for lead at each yearly wellness visit. So far, their test results have been normal. Still, she planned to take her youngest to a free clinic at a local church to get tested again. Santana Wells said she had a son and a niece attending fifth grade at Brown Street Academy, which closed May 12, about a month before school ended. Being at a different school caused her son to miss out on a lot of activities Brown Street had planned for its departing fifth-graders, she said. 'Brown Street used to do a carnival every year. They do a picnic. They have a long list of what they were doing for their graduates,' Wells said. Now, she said, it was a pared-down field trip, which felt unfair. Wells said she 'runs a tight schedule' at home to make it to work by 3 p.m. each day. With the change in schools, her son was arriving home later, which made her late to work, on top of everything else. Several parents said their kids had questions about the lead and felt anxious about going back to school in the fall, even though the city has tested their schools and deemed them safe to reoccupy. The stories told on Monday weren't just for the ears of the federal government. Totoraitis said the questions from children were a light-bulb moment for him, too. The health department's workers took great care to explain the lead situation to parents, but they hadn't done as much to try to answer kids' questions about what was happening. He said the department would work on that. He also hopes to temporarily hire at least one of the laid-off CDC lead experts for a few weeks to come review the city's efforts and make sure they are on track. Baldwin hopes the federal government will rehire them, too. 'These were the renowned experts on childhood lead mitigation and remediation, and the federal government needs to have that staff capacity to help, just as they did in Flint, Michigan,' she said. 'That's needed here, right now, in Milwaukee.' The US Environmental Protection Agency lifted its emergency order on drinking water in Flint last month — nine years after it was put into place.
Yahoo
07-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Milwaukee Health Department warns of skin disease from unlicensed tattoo operation
The Milwaukee Health Department is investigating unlicensed tattoo operations after cases of skin disease in minors emerged. The health department said it started investigating the case after a report on May 14 from a medical provider of a case of nontuberculous mycobacteria from a tattoo procedure on a minor. The health department said they found two additional cases of minors with NTM on May 20 and June 2. The health department teamed up with the Milwaukee Police Department to find one of the suspects, according to Carly Hegarty, director of consumer environmental health for the City of Milwaukee. Citations were issued against Jonathan Beasley accusing him of giving tattoos to minors without a license. He faces $614 in fines. MPD and health officials connected Beasley to two locations associated with Davinci Way Ink. NTM is an environmental bacterium that can cause a skin infection. NTM can come from tattooing if the tattoo tools aren't properly cleaned or used in unsterile tap water used to distill the black ink, according to a health department press release. According to Hegarty, the symptoms of NTM are swelling, pain, and pus and drainage near the tattoo area. While NTM can heal in two to three months, Hegarty said anyone who believes they have NTM should get an official diagnosis and treatment from a doctor. The Milwaukee Health Department is urging medical professionals to report if they see cases of tattoo-related infections and to ask their patients about recent tattoos and where they obtained them. Investigations into other unlicensed tattoo operations are still ongoing, Hegarty said. For parents or other people interested in tattoo safety, Hegarty said there are a few signs people can look for to be safe. According to the press release, licensed tattoo artists are supposed to verify the age of the person receiving the tattoo, follow proper sanitation procedures and give detailed instructions for aftercare. Hegarty said when getting tattoos, regardless of age, it's important to advocate for yourself. 'People absolutely have the right to ask, hey, can I see your City of Milwaukee-issued license? Can I see your practitioner's license? I would say good any tattoo artist would have that readily available,' Hegarty said. This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Cases of skin disease from illegal tattoo operation in Milwaukee
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
CDC's childhood lead program is still defunct, despite Kennedy's claims
The federal government's Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program is not operating, despite Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s claims that it's being funded. The program's 26 staffers were placed on administrative leave in April, with terminations set for June 2, as part of a broader restructuring of federal agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services. To date, none of the staffers have been reinstated, with layoffs set to take effect in less than two weeks, said Erik Svendsen, director of the Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice, a department within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that includes the childhood lead program. Kennedy had faced criticism in recent weeks from Democratic senators over the gutting of the program, which assisted state and local health departments with blood lead testing and surveillance. At a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday, Kennedy told Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., that the program was still being funded. The week before, he told Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., that he had no plans to eliminate it. But Svendsen said his entire division was dissolved by HHS and can't be easily replaced. 'There are no other experts that do what we do,' he said. 'You can't just push a button and get new people because our areas of public health are so specialized.' Staffers in the childhood lead program have not received direction about how to transition their work, according to two CDC scientists familiar with the matter. Even low levels of lead exposure could put children at risk of developmental delays, learning difficulties and behavioral issues. The CDC program offered technical expertise to help under-resourced health departments prevent those outcomes. In 2023, it helped solve a nationwide lead poisoning outbreak linked to cinnamon applesauce. And it was in frequent contact with the Milwaukee Health Department this year after the city discovered dangerous lead levels in some public schools. Kennedy told Reed on Tuesday that 'we have a team in Milwaukee' offering laboratory and analytics support to the health department. But the Milwaukee Health Department said that Kennedy's statement was inaccurate, and that the city had not received any federal epidemiological or analytical support related to the lead crisis. 'Unfortunately, in this case, that is another example where the secretary doesn't have his facts straight,' said Mike Totoraitis, the city's health commissioner. Caroline Reinwald, a spokesperson for the Milwaukee Health Department, said that the federal government's only recent involvement in the lead crisis was 'a short, two-week visit from a single CDC staff member this month, who assisted with the validation of a new instrument in our laboratory.' 'This support was requested independently of the [Milwaukee Public Schools] crisis and was part of a separate, pre-existing need to expand our lab's long-term capacity for lead testing,' Reinwald said in a statement. HHS has said it will continue efforts to eliminate childhood lead poisoning through a newly created department called the Administration for a Healthy America. But Democratic lawmakers and environmental health groups question how the work can continue without reinstating staffers. 'Despite what you told me last week, that you have no intention of eliminating this program, you fired the entire office responsible for carrying it out,' Baldwin told Kennedy at Tuesday's hearing. 'Your decision to fire staff and eliminate offices is endangering children, including thousands of children in Milwaukee.' HHS did not respond to a request for comment. Kennedy did not offer new details about his agency's restructuring plan at the hearing, citing a court order that compelled the Trump administration to pause efforts to downsize the federal government. Milwaukee's lead crisis became clear to health officials in February, when the city's health department identified dangerous levels of the toxin in school classrooms, hallways and common areas, due to lead dust and deteriorating lead-based paint. Before the childhood lead program was gutted, the CDC had been meeting with the Milwaukee Health Department on a weekly basis to come up with a plan to screen tens of thousands of students for lead poisoning, Totoraitis said. The city's health department asked the CDC on March 26 to send staffers to help, Totoraitis said, but the agency fired its childhood lead team on April 1 and denied Milwaukee's request two days later. 'This is the first time in at least 75 years that the CDC has ever denied an Epi-Aid request, so it's a pretty historic moment,' he said, referring to a request for the CDC to investigate an urgent public health problem. To date, the Milwaukee Health Department has identified more than 100 schools built before 1978, when the federal government banned consumer uses of lead-based paints. Around 40 of those have been inspected, Totoraitis said. Six schools have closed since the start of the year due to lead contamination, and only two have reopened. Around 350 students in Milwaukee have been screened for lead poisoning out of 44,000 identified as having a potential risk, Totoraitis said. The city has confirmed one case linked to lead exposure in school, and two more linked to exposures at both school and home. The health department said it is investigating an additional four cases, which may involve multiple sources of exposure. Totoraitis said the department is accustomed to looking for lead in homes and rental units, but the CDC was supposed to help them scale that operation to inspect larger buildings. CDC staffers were also supposed to help set up lead screening clinics and investigate where kids had been exposed, he said. While the health department is handling those efforts on its own now, Totoraitis said it may not have the capacity to screen everyone in a timely manner. He estimated that the department could manage around 1,000 to 1,200 cases of childhood lead poisoning a year. That includes testing kids' blood lead levels, treating lead poisoning with chelation therapy (which removes heavy metals from the bloodstream) and eliminating exposures in the home by replacing windows and doors. Totoraitis said he's hoping to hire two of the terminated CDC employees for at least a couple of weeks to help address lingering questions about how to manage the crisis. Better yet, he said, 'I keep hoping to get an email from them saying, 'Hey, we got our jobs back.'' This article was originally published on
NBC News
22-05-2025
- Health
- NBC News
CDC's childhood lead program is still defunct, despite Kennedy's claims
The federal government's Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program is not operating, despite Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s claims that it's being funded. The program's 26 staffers were placed on administrative leave in April, with terminations set for June 2, as part of a broader restructuring of federal agencies within HHS. To date, none of the staffers have been reinstated, with layoffs set to take effect in less than two weeks, said Erik Svendsen, director of the Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice, a department within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that includes the childhood lead program. Kennedy had faced criticism in recent weeks from Democratic senators over the gutting of the program, which assisted state and local health departments with blood lead testing and surveillance. At a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday, Kennedy told Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., that the program was still being funded. The week before, he told Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., that he had no plans to eliminate it. But Svendsen said his entire division was dissolved by HHS and can't be easily replaced. 'There are no other experts that do what we do,' he said. 'You can't just push a button and get new people because our areas of public health are so specialized.' Staffers in the childhood lead program have not received direction about how to transition their work, according to two CDC scientists familiar with the matter. Even low levels of lead exposure could put children at risk of developmental delays, learning difficulties and behavioral issues. The CDC program offered technical expertise to help under-resourced health departments prevent those outcomes. In 2023, it helped solve a nationwide lead poisoning outbreak linked to cinnamon applesauce. And it was in frequent contact with the Milwaukee Health Department this year after the city discovered dangerous lead levels in some public schools. Kennedy told Reed on Tuesday that 'we have a team in Milwaukee' offering laboratory and analytics support to the health department. But the Milwaukee Health Department said that Kennedy's statement was inaccurate, and that the city had not received any federal epidemiological or analytical support related to the lead crisis. 'Unfortunately, in this case, that is another example where the secretary doesn't have his facts straight,' said Mike Totoraitis, the city's health commissioner. Caroline Reinwald, a spokesperson for the Milwaukee Health Department, said that the federal government's only recent involvement in the lead crisis was 'a short, two-week visit from a single CDC staff member this month, who assisted with the validation of a new instrument in our laboratory.' 'This support was requested independently of the [Milwaukee Public Schools] crisis and was part of a separate, pre-existing need to expand our lab's long-term capacity for lead testing,' Reinwald said in a statement. The Department of Health and Human Services has said it will continue efforts to eliminate childhood lead poisoning through a newly created department called the Administration for a Healthy America. But Democratic lawmakers and environmental health groups question how the work can continue without reinstating staffers. 'Despite what you told me last week, that you have no intention of eliminating this program, you fired the entire office responsible for carrying it out,' Baldwin told Kennedy at Tuesday's hearing. 'Your decision to fire staff and eliminate offices is endangering children, including thousands of children in Milwaukee.' HHS did not respond to a request for comment. Kennedy did not offer new details about his agency's restructuring plan at the hearing, citing a court order that compelled the Trump administration to pause efforts to downsize the federal government. Milwaukee's lead crisis became clear to health officials in February, when the city's health department identified dangerous levels of the toxin in school classrooms, hallways and common areas, due to lead dust and deteriorating lead-based paint. Before the childhood lead program was gutted, the CDC had been meeting with the Milwaukee Health Department on a weekly basis to come up with a plan to screen tens of thousands of students for lead poisoning, Totoraitis said. The city's health department asked the CDC on March 26 to send staffers to help, Totoraitis said, but the agency fired its childhood lead team on April 1 and denied Milwaukee's request two days later. 'This is the first time in at least 75 years that the CDC has ever denied an Epi-Aid request, so it's a pretty historic moment,' he said, referring to a request for the CDC to investigate an urgent public health problem. To date, the Milwaukee Health Department has identified more than 100 schools built before 1978, when the federal government banned consumer uses of lead-based paints. Around 40 of those have been inspected, Totoraitis said. Six schools have closed since the start of the year due to lead contamination, and only two have reopened. Around 350 students in Milwaukee have been screened for lead poisoning out of 44,000 identified as having a potential risk, Totoraitis said. The city has confirmed one case linked to lead exposure in school, and two more linked to exposures at both school and home. The health department said it is investigating an additional four cases, which may involve multiple sources of exposure. Totoraitis said the department is accustomed to looking for lead in homes and rental units, but the CDC was supposed to help them scale that operation to inspect larger buildings. CDC staffers were also supposed to help set up lead screening clinics and investigate where kids had been exposed, he said. While the health department is handling those efforts on its own now, Totoraitis said it may not have the capacity to screen everyone in a timely manner. He estimated that the department could manage around 1,000 to 1,200 cases of childhood lead poisoning a year. That includes testing kids' blood lead levels, treating lead poisoning with chelation therapy (which removes heavy metals from the bloodstream) and eliminating exposures in the home by replacing windows and doors. Totoraitis said he's hoping to hire two of the terminated CDC employees for at least a couple of weeks to help address lingering questions about how to manage the crisis. Better yet, he said, 'I keep hoping to get an email from them saying, 'Hey, we got our jobs back.''
