Michigan health chief charged in Flint water contamination probe

Michigan health chief charged in Flint water contamination probe.
Nick Lyon is accused of failing to alert the public about an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in the Flint area, which has been linked by some experts to poor water quality in 2014-15.
Lyon also is charged with misconduct in office for allegedly obstructing university researchers who are studying if the surge in cases is linked to the Flint River.
The state’s chief medical officer, Dr. Eden Wells, is accused of obstruction of justice and lying to an investigator.
The charges were read in court by Seipenko, a member of the state attorney general’s team.
Lyon was personally briefed in January 2015 but “took no action to alert the public of a deadly” outbreak until nearly a year later, Seipenko said.
He told state lawmakers that experts likely wanted to “solve the problem” before they raised it with senior officials in the Snyder administration.
The investigation, he said, “wasn’t one that was easily solved.” Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has now charged 15 current or former government officials in an ongoing probe that began in early 2016, including two emergency managers whom Snyder appointed to run the impoverished city of roughly 100,000 residents.
In May, Schuette dropped a misdemeanor charge against a Flint official who cooperated after pleading no contest to willful neglect of duty.
Seipenko said Wells told an investigator that she had no knowledge of the outbreak until late September or early October 2015.

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