"“The people who were answering our questions are just gone,” City Health Commissioner Michael Totoraitis said in an interview after the firings Tuesday at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

"When Milwaukee officials discovered in January that lead paint in school buildings had poisoned kids, they called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

City Health Commissioner Michael Totoraitis has been leaning on federal experts to help prioritize which of the city’s 68,000 public school students to test first for the potent neurotoxin — and to advise what to do if lead tests come back positive.

But he was forced to stop calling Tuesday morning when staffers at the CDC’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program were fired."

Ariel Wittenberg reports for E&E News April 4, 2025. [2]