From Flint to Oakland: America’s burgeoning lead exposure crisis
The 2014 exposure of widespread lead contamination in Flint, Michigan, remains an ongoing public health nightmare. As advocates and residents work to address the consequences of lead poisoning and ensure that the city's struggles do not disappear from news coverage, Flint’s water remains polluted and unsafe to drink. While water test results are improving -- and at least 13 former city and state officials have been charged with contributing to the poisoning -- residents continue to suffer the consequences, from illness and injury to the inconvenience of living with undrinkable water.
But this public health crisis is not relegated to Flint alone. While removing lead from paint and gasoline have been an extraordinary public health success story, lead-contaminated soil that surrounds older homes remains a significant source of lead exposure that has not yet received widespread attention.
A recent Reuters investigation analyzed blood tests from state health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found over 3,000 U.S. communities with lead levels twice as high as in Flint, with over 1,100 of those communities reporting lead levels four times as high. Like Flint, many of these communities are plagued by similar conditions: crumbling paint, corroded plumbing systems, and exposure to industrial waste. But unlike Flint, these lead hotspots are receiving little press attention and next to no government assistance to mitigate the health impacts posed by lead.
As reported in the East Bay Times, a section of Oakland, California, is one such community. According to Reuters, 500 children tested who live within the Fruitvale ZIP code 94601, 7.57 percent of children had elevated levels of lead in their blood — far exceeding the nationwide average of 2.5 percent, according to the CDC. The threat to Oaklanders originates from lead-based paint on buildings (90 percent of Oakland’s housing was built before the 1978 ban on lead paint) that is present in the soil and air.
Today at least four million households with children face exposure to high levels of lead. There are approximately half a million U.S. children under age five with blood lead levels above the level at which CDC recommends public health actions be initiated. One in every four to six children may have elevated lead levels in inner cities. Lead poisoning severely impairs the body, especially the nervous system, and is especially damaging to kids, whose brains are still developing, harming children’s ability to concentrate, learn, and rest. Even low levels of exposure over time affect kids' physical and mental development, lowering IQs, slowing body growth, and triggering behavioral problems. With poor diet, the effects are even greater.
Getting rid of lead requires arduous, painful treatment, although even this doesn't reverse existing damage. Lead poses a risk to all children but not all children are equally likely to be exposed to lead: studies show that African-American children are nearly three times as likely to experience lead poisoning as their Caucasian peers, and low-income children are two times as likely experience lead poisoning as more affluent kids.
Prior to the 1970s, our environment was saturated with lead: lead was in paint, gasoline, and cookware, as well as in water and soil. Thousands of children were being poisoned, especially kids from lower-income communities who were more likely to live in homes where the paint was peeling, or alongside freeways, breathing in lead dust and playing in contaminated soil. Educating people about lead poisoning prevention was important, but education and parental vigilance alone can’t combat such an omnipresent threat. The petroleum and chemical industries lined up on the side of profits and worked with legislative allies to derail public health policies that would have saved lives and prevented illness and injury to U.S. kids.
Prevention advocates and communities formed coalitions and worked together to change national policy. After years of community organizing and mounting political pressure, Congress passed sweeping legislation that removed some key sources of lead from the environment. As a result, community exposure to lead decreased, and the number of lead poisoning cases has drastically reduced. And we’ve saved money as well as lives: a recent CDC analysis suggests that every dollar spent to reduce lead hazards shows a $17-$220 return on investment, for an overall savings of $181 billion to $269 billion.
Reducing children’s exposure to lead is one of the greatest environmental health accomplishments in the past 20 years. Yet, in recent years, the federal government has drastically scaled back lead prevention efforts, including the CDC’s Healthy Homes and Lead Poisoning Prevention Programs, halting decades of national surveillance and monitoring for lead poisoning, ending support to state and local lead prevention programs, and exacerbating health disparities in low-income children of color.
It’s unacceptable that so many U.S. children continue to suffer from preventable lead poisoning in the U.S. today as a result of residual lead toxicity from previous generations and other exposures that aren't well regulated. Without prevention funds, more children will get sick and injured from preventable, predictable causes, which in turn drives up healthcare costs. We know how to prevent lead poisoning and how to minimize its impact.
All communities should be safe places to live—but not all communities enjoy equal access to what they need to be safe and healthy. It’s time for all of us to stand up and show zero tolerance for lead poisoning. Our children are counting on us. History has shown that we need to focus on changing the community conditions that determine lead exposure. It's neither humane nor cost effective to rely on treatment, after a poisoning diagnosis, when we know how to prevent lead poisoning in the first place. We have to cultivate a new way of thinking and acting up front: identifying clues that point to things that need improving in the environment and fully funding the CDC’s Healthy Homes and Lead Poisoning Prevention Programs.