Lead poisoning of our children: then and now

Back in 2016 much of the country was shocked to learn about widespread lead poisoning among children in Flint, MI. The cause was lead leached from old lead pipes supplying water to people’s homes after the source was changed from Lake Huron to the more corrosive water of the Flint River (to save money, of course). The identification of this problem was largely due to the great work of a committed pediatrician, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, about whom I wrote on Jan 24, 2016, “Flint, lead, medical heroes, O-rings and guns”. That piece also discusses the shameful – probably criminal – denial of both the problem and its cause by the then-governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, and his politically appointed state health department, until the evidence became too overwhelming to deny. After all, poisoning children is one thing, but getting negative press is another!

Many of us probably assumed – or at least hoped – that this epidemic of lead poisoning of children, as horrible as it was, was an exception, an outlier, something that should not be happening in the 21^st century in the United States. We knew that it was related to the fact that Flint is a poor, largely minority, community, and if we are at all sentient we know that those are the people who suffer the worst from environmental degradation. In the case of lead poisoning, they live in houses that are more likely to have old lead paint, in neighborhoods built closer to heavy automobile and truck traffic areas where the soil (such as, for example, in the playgrounds) has high concentrations of lead. We might have even thought of lead pipes supplying water. But surely this was not something that was happening in many places around the country, even in poor communities?

 

But it was, and is. All over. More in very poor and minority communities.

A few years ago, [Sean] Ryan, now a Democratic state senator, learned that his constituents in Buffalo were sending bottled water to Flint, Mich., where widespread lead contamination in the water supply had drawn national attention. While respecting the gesture to help, he recalled from a Reuters investigation that there were 17 ZIP codes in Buffalo where the rate of children with high lead levels was at least double that of Flint. (Gabler, NY Times, below)

And it is still happening. And still not being addressed. Flint may have stood out because of the sudden increase in children with high lead levels identified by people like Dr. Hanna-Attisha after the change in water to a cheaper source leached lead from the old pipes, but chronic, ongoing lead poisoning of our children, primarily from lead paint in old houses, continues apace. And there is a lot of resistance to doing anything about it.

 

This is covered in depth in a recent (Mar 29, 2022) article in the NY Times by Ellen Gabler, ”How 2 Industries Stymied Justice for Young Lead Paint Victims”. This exposé documents the ongoing and continuing poisoning of America’s children (particularly those of poor and minority people) by lead paint in houses (“about 500,000 children under 6 have elevated blood lead levels in the United States and are at risk of harm”). One of the two industries is the housing industry, which both lies about whether there is lead paint in the homes that they are renting, and, if they are large enough, obstruct those people from finding some sort of (generally financial) justice by hiding the ownership in a web of companies, and fighting culpability.

 

Without insurance, there is little chance of recovering money for a child when a landlord has few resources. Property owners who do have substantial holdings have found ways to legally distance themselves from problem rentals, increasingly using L.L.C.s to hide assets and identities.

 

And the other industry? That would be the insurance industry itself, which places clauses in its homeowner’s policy excluding lead. Why? Well, you see, it would cost the insurance company a lot of money if they had to pay for the mitigation of lead paint in these old houses. So they don’t insure the owners, and the owners are either unable to afford to do the mitigation or are large and wealthy enough that they could afford it but choose not to. In fairness, the quote above about property owners legally distancing themselves from “problem rentals” applies to many “problems” (virtually all of which are the owners’ responsibility), not just lead. Property owners want to collect rent but not maintain the property; insurance companies want to collect premiums but not pay out when there is a problem. What could be more American?

 

Another recent article, in Medscape, documents how most current adults had elevated lead levels as children, and how, as stated in its title, Half of Adults Lost IQ Points to Lead Toxicity. The culprit in this case is primarily lead in gasoline. Added to gasoline beginning in the early 1920s, lead’s phaseout was accelerated by the advent of catalytic converters, which require unleaded gas, in 1975, but it was probably an additional 20 years before it was gone from most gasoline sold.  And, of course, the residual lead in the soil (including places where children play) remains even today. This graphic from the article demonstrates how ubiquitous high lead levels were when today’s adults were children, what age ranges are most affected, and of course how minority children (and today’s adults) were affected with levels far higher than whites (which were bad enough).

 

 

So we have a situation where the majority of today’s adults, at lead those over the age of 30, probably had high lead levels when they were children, and have lost IQ points as a result, and where poor and minority children then (now adults) had far higher levels than whites. And we have another situation in which children continue to have high lead levels, and to suffer not “just” a loss of a few IQ points but serious brain damage, because of ongoing lead exposure, now primarily in lead paint that still exists, unmitigated, in many houses. And, of course, these children are disproportionately poor and minority. (Some things, sadly, do not change.) When I was a young physician, working at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, we would not infrequently have to treat (often as inpatients) children with high lead levels. I thought, like measles and chicken pox and rheumatic fever and infections from Hemophilus influenza that this was pretty much history, stories of the “old days” that I could tell medical students and young doctors. I am aghast to discover how common it continues to be.

 

But there is another part of the story. It is that lead could be cleaned up. Houses with lead paint could have that lead mitigated. If it were, children would no longer be exposed to it and suffer the kind of brain damage described in the Times article. But it isn’t happening, because of the stonewalling, opposition, and outright blockage by the landlord and insurance industries, and their enablers in Congress and state legislatures. Their profits, of course, are more important than the brains of developing children, especially poor and minority children.

 

You can’t have it both ways — be a big company when it benefits you to generate revenue and business, and then hide behind an L.L.C. when you are sued in an attempt to escape accountability

 

says the attorney for “JJ”, a South Bend, IN, child with brain damage from lead paint in his home.

 

But they do have it both ways – this is how the US treats companies compared to children. And as a result we have the article’s final quote from JJ’s mother:

 

“We know it damaged his brain,” she said. “We know it is irreversible. And we know it is a lifelong thing. No doctor can tell you, ‘This is what is going to be.’”

 

Somehow, this does not make me proud.