Lead Poisoning: The Ignored Scandal

A new book, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America's Children, written by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, documents the studies conducted on toddlers in Baltimore by Johns Hopkins University in the 1990s.  Yes, that is right, the 1990s.  The study was conducted by researchers J. Julian Chisolm (deceased), and Mark Farfel.  This review, by Helen Epstein, in The New York Review of Books, recounts the studies and the effects on the children, whose parents were not told about the lead in their homes and whose children suffered the devastating effects of lead poisoning.

Excerpt:

In December 1993, a slum landlord in Baltimore named Lawrence Polakoff rented an apartment to a twenty-one-year-old single mother and her three-year-old son, Max. A few days after they moved in, Max’s mother was invited to participate in a research study comparing how well different home renovation methods protected children from lead poisoning, which is still a major problem endangering the health of millions of American children, many of them poor.

Congress had banned the sale of interior lead paint in 1978, but it remained on the walls of millions of homes nationwide, and there was no adequate federal program to deal with it. In Baltimore, most slum housing contained at least some lead paint, and nearly half of the children who lived in these houses had levels of lead in their blood well above that considered safe by the Centers for Disease Control. Max’s blood lead was low when he moved into Polakoff’s apartment, but Polakoff had been cited at least ten times in the past for violating Baltimore’s lead paint regulations, and several former tenants would later sue him for poisoning their children, so the boy was now in great danger.

The research study in which Max and his mother participated was run by two scientists affiliated with Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University with support from the US Environmental Protection Agency. The scientists had formed a partnership with a local contractor, who identified slum landlords like Polakoff and urged them to rent preferentially to families with children aged six months to four years, just when they start crawling around the house and when lead exposure is most dangerous to the developing brain. If the parents agreed, their home would receive one of three different types of lead removal and their children—all of whom were healthy and normal and had low blood lead when they joined the study—would be given regular blood tests to see if their lead levels rose or fell

To read the entire review, go here.