http://grist.org/living/why-is-lead-poisoning-still-an-issue-in-cities/
[links in on-line article]
Why is lead poisoning still an issue in cities?
By Raven Rakia on 21 Oct 2015
We already know that urban communities of color are more likely to lack
access to healthy foods and to suffer from air pollution. But remember
lead poisoning? Yeah, that’s still a problem, too.
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control released a study that showed
elevated levels of lead poisoning in children living near a shuttered
factory in North Philadelphia. While the factory hasn’t operated since
1996, the CDC study showed that a heightened level of lead exposure
persists in the surrounding neighborhoods.
Today, we know exactly how to prevent lead exposure — but the toxic
metal still lingers in many cities. Exposure to lead can lead to
permanent health damage, including kidney failure and high blood
pressure. In children, it can permanently affect brain and nervous
system development, and pregnant women who are exposed are at higher
risk of miscarriage and stillbirths, according to the World Health
Organization.
NPR reports:
Federal testing made public last month found about 1 in 7 kids in
neighborhoods surrounding the site had elevated levels of lead in their
blood. That’s compared to a national average of 1 in 40.
“I would love to say that I’m shocked, but obviously we’re not,”
says Sandy Salzman, head of the local community development corporation.
She says 71 percent of soil samples taken in the neighborhood also had
elevated lead levels.
“We were expecting them to be high. I don’t think we thought they
were going to be as high as they were, or as many houses were going to
be involved,” she says.
Nationally, average blood lead levels in kids have decreased
tenfold in the last few decades. But lead still lingers stubbornly in
homes and soil, especially in older cities.
Lead exposure is usually attributed to crumbling paint in old homes —
but the toxic metal can also leach into soil and water. The now-closed
factory, which produced lead products in the ’80s and ’90s, “spewed lead
dust from its smokestacks that would have landed in the yards of the
nearby row houses that have long surrounded the site,” according to USA
Today. The CDC tested the surrounding neighborhood’s soil and the blood
of its residents, and found high levels of lead in both.
North Philadelphia is a working class part of the city, and over 80
percent of its residents are black or Latino. Historically, the
neighborhood’s prosperity has been heavily dependent on local factories
— whose shutdowns led to significant economic loss for most of its
residents.
Despite being banned from products manufactured today, lead exposure is
still an issue in urban areas like Cleveland, Baltimore, and other
cities that historically had a large number of factories. Today, the
issue is one that particularly affects black communities. In July, a
Huffington Post study found a correlation between cities with a larger
population of African-Americans and high rates of lead poisoning. “This
is a disease that primarily impacts African-Americans,” Matthew
Chachère, a staff attorney of the Northern Manhattan Improvement
Corporation and strong advocate for lead exposure prevention laws, told
the Huffington Post. The Huffington Post noted:
In our analysis, a handful of cities stood out as having a high
percentage of African-American residents and a high number of children
with elevated blood-lead levels. Nationally, African-Americans make up
13 percent of the population, but in Savannah, Georgia, for example,
which is 57 percent black, more than 5 percent of children had elevated
blood-lead levels, compared to the 0.5 percent of children with elevated
blood-lead levels nationally. Four percent of children in Montgomery,
Alabama, and 3 percent of children in Birmingham, Alabama — both of
which are more than 50 percent black — had elevated blood-lead levels.
Lead exposure is making cities across the United States unsafe for
people who cannot afford to move away from contaminated sites or out of
contaminated homes. And what’s equally — if not more — concerning is
that most of that exposure either comes from long-closed factories or
decades-old construction.
Proper legislation and cleaning up contaminated sites could go a long
way in preventing lead exposure — but the seeming lack of urgency around
the issue has been cause for frustration. In a 14-month investigation,
USA TODAY found that, despite warnings that lead factories may have
contaminated the soil, “EPA and state officials have left families and
children in harm’s way, doing little to assess the danger around many
sites.”
For example, the recent public health emergency in Flint, Mich., around
high levels of lead in the city’s water would have been preventable if
officials had taken adequate steps to test the infrastructure before
changing the water supply. Since April, residents had been complaining
of discolored water, rashes, and other health issues; however, it wasn’t
until a set of researchers and activists set out to test the water
consistently and prove there was a real problem that a state of
emergency was declared.
As it turns out, lead exposure is not as much a thing of the past as
we’d like to think — it’s very much a part of our present, and it’s up
to local governments to ensure it’s not a part of our future. So, if you
care about that kind of thing, remember to vote.
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