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Students at four BPS schools may have been exposed to lead due to BPS miscommunication

WBZ reports workers turned on fountains at the Lee and Mather schools in Dorchester, the Curley school in Jamaica Plain and Another Course to College in Brighton by mistake and that students may have drunk from them before they were shut off again because of elevated lead levels.

Parents are not amused:

[A BPS administrator] met with staff on January 29th to discuss the water situation. But didn’t notify school families until February 12th. In addition, the families were told not to worry, there were no health risks associated with the elevated levels. BPS was just being proactive by turning off those fountains. If she knew about the issues at the Mather, why did she not include it in last week’s count of schools impacted by elevated levels of lead.

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Comments

Don't you have to drink/eat a fair amount of lead to have it have even the slightest effect? Is an occasional sip out of a water fountain going to harm anyone?

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It wont. Schools and homes have had lead pipes for decade in MA, particularly homes. For some reason lead pipes are suddenly a crisis tho.

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that due to the Flint water contamination issue (which is indeed a crisis as well as a criminal act), folks are being more sensitive to lead in drinking water. The problem is not with lead pipes, it is with old lead pipes that leach lead into drinking water which is very harmful, especially to children.

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Dose makes the poison.

Drinking a few seconds of water from a tainted water fountain once or twice won't even register as a problem. Drinking all your water from it, every day, is a problem.

I kind of find the new alarm around water pipes to be amusing, though: going back to elementary school in my decidedly not-pretentions neighborhood, we all felt that School Water was Gross and Poison. In high school (different town), everyone bought bottled water instead of drinking School Water. In college, everyone turned up to the dorms with a Brita and wouldn't drink tap water.

I guess we were right to be cautious, in our school buildings built between 1930-1955 and our dorms built between 1920 and 1970.

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