Healthy Indoors Magazine - USA Edition

Healthy Indoors 13 cent of small children have elevated levels. In the communities identified by this analysis, a far higher rate of children who got tested had lead poisoning. In most cases, the local data covers a 5- or 10-year period through 2015. "We need to do more." Milwaukee Health Com- missioner Bevan Baker, whose city has boosted childhood blood screenings Reporters visited several of the trouble spots: a neighborhood with many rundown homes in South Bend, Indiana; a rural mining town in Mis- souri's Lead Belt; the economically depressed North Side of Milwaukee. In each location, it was easy to find people whose lives have been im- pacted by lead exposure. While poverty remains a potent predictor of lead poisoning, the victims span the American spectrum—poor and rich, ru- ral and urban, black and white. Mapping Lead Hazards Most U.S. states disclose data on the percentage of child blood tests that show elevated levels of lead. Yet this data, often for statewide or coun- ty-wide populations, is too broad to identify neigh- borhoods where children face the greatest risk. Instead, Reuters sought testing data at the neighborhood level, in census tracts or zip code areas, submitting records requests to all 50 states. U.S. census tracts are small county subdivi- sions that average about 4,000 residents apiece. poisoned. In the year after Flint switched to corro- sive river water that leached lead from old pipes, 5 percent of the children screened there had high blood lead levels. Flint is no aberration. In fact, it doesn't even rank among the most dangerous lead hotspots in America. In all, Reuters found nearly 3,000 areas with recently recorded lead poisoning rates at least double those in Flint during the peak of that city's contamination crisis. And more than 1,100 of these communities had a rate of elevated blood tests at least four times higher. The poisoned places on this map stretch from Warren, Pennsylvania, a town on the Allegheny River where 36 percent of children tested had high lead levels, to a zip code on Goat Island, Texas, where a quarter of tests showed poison- ing. In some pockets of Baltimore, Cleveland and Philadelphia, where lead poisoning has spanned generations, the rate of elevated tests over the last decade was 40 to 50 percent. Like Flint, many of these localities are plagued by legacy lead: crumbling paint, plumbing, or in- dustrial waste left behind. Unlike Flint, many have received little attention or funding to combat poisoning. To identify these locations, Reuters examined neighborhood-level blood testing results, most of which have not been previously disclosed. The data, obtained from state health departments and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Pre- vention, tracks poisoning rates among children tested in each location. The resulting portrait provides a granular look at places where decades-long U.S. efforts to stamp out lead poisoning have fallen short. "The disparities you've found between differ- ent areas have stark implications," said Dr. Helen Egger, chair of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center's Child Study Center. "Where lead poisoning remains common, many children will have developmental delays and start out behind all the rest." In children up to age 6, the CDC threshold for an elevated blood lead level is 5 micrograms per deciliter. Any child who tests high warrants a pub- lic health response, the agency says; even a slight elevation can reduce IQ and stunt development. Nationwide, the CDC estimates that 2.5 per- WATER KITS: Milwaukee residents wait in line for water filtration kits under a pilot program run by the Sixteenth Street Clinic, United Way and the city. REUTERS/Darren Hauck

• Cover