For the past two years people in Flint, Michigan, have been given poisoned water that exposed an entire generation of kids to lead, a deadly toxin that can permanently damage developing brains.
This week President Barack Obama traveled there to tell them they'll be okay. Kinda.
"If you know that your child may have been exposed and you go to a health clinic, a doctor, a provider, and are working with them, then your child will be fine," Obama said. And he drank a glass of filtered Flint water.
At the same time, just by being there, the president signaled that Flint remains an important story -- that the poisoning of an entire city's water supply with a deadly neurotoxin still matters.
"The president's visit comes at a really crucial time, at least for the people from Flint -- I can speak for myself in this regard -- it was beginning to feel like the urgency was fading," Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.), who represents the area around Flint, told "So That Happened," the HuffPost Politics podcast.
"Many of us who have been involved in trying to fight for Flint even long before it became a national story have had a concern that Flint would sort of get its 15 minutes of fame, there'd be a lot of attention around this lead crisis, and then some other event would overtake things and Flint would become sort of an asterisk in history," Kildee said.
Lead contaminated Flint's water after the city switched from Detroit to the Flint River as its water source in April 2014. State officials told the city not to treat the water with chemicals that reduce lead leaching from the city's pipes, resulting in higher blood lead levels in Flint children.
Obama noted that Flint is not the only city that's had lead problems. Millions of American homes contain lead paint, and millions are connected to water mains via lead pipes.
"What happened here is just an extreme example, an extreme and tragic case of what’s happening in a lot of places around the country," Obama said. "We’ve seen unacceptably high levels of lead in townships along the Jersey Shore and in North Carolina’s major cities. We’ve seen it in the capitals of South Carolina and Mississippi. And even, not long ago, lead-contaminated drinking water was found right down the street from the United States Capitol."
Flint's crisis came to a head last fall after research showed the city's leaded water contributed to an increase in elevated blood levels, in Flint kids who'd been tested, from 2.4 percent to 4.9 percent.
To reinforce the message that Flint's kids would be all right, Obama pointed to himself.
"If you are my age, or older, or maybe even a little bit younger, you got some lead in your system when you were growing up," Obama said. "I am sure that somewhere, when I was two years old, I was taking a chip of paint, tasting it, and I got some lead. Or sometimes toys were painted with lead, and you were chewing on them."
As public health experts have learned more about the dangers of lead, thresholds for what is considered a "safe" level of exposure have fallen steadily in the past several decades. The government banned lead from gasoline and paint, and it developed rules for limiting people's exposure through water tainted by lead pipes. Rates of lead exposure in children, the population most vulnerable to its effects, have fallen.
Bruce Lanphear, an expert on childhood exposure to neurotoxins at Simon Fraser University in Canada, said government officials need to strike a tricky balance with a situation like Flint's.
"We want to protect people, we want people to feel protected," Lanphear said. "The way Obama dealt with it on one level makes sense, on another level dismisses a really important problem."
As public health experts have developed a better understanding of lead, its potential to cause harm at even low doses has become apparent.
Research by Lanphear and others has shown that a person's first increment of lead exposure can cost exponentially more IQ points than subsequent increments.
That doesn't mean a child exposed to lead will necessarily suffer from ADHD or other cognitive and behavioral problems associated with lead exposure, just that there's a higher risk.
"When we talk about something like lead we don't want to label these kids in Flint, or in the other cities where blood lead levels are higher, as damaged," Lanphear said. "The goal of trying to point out there are problems at the low levels is to create enough of a sense of urgency that we do something about it."