High levels of lead found in water at some Montgomery County schools

Brain-damaging lead found in tap water in hundreds of homes tested across Chicago, results show

A Tribune analysis of the results shows lead was found in water drawn from nearly 70 percent of the 2,797 homes tested during the past two years. Tap water in 3 of every 10 homes sampled had lead concentrations above 5 parts per billion, the maximum allowed in bottled water by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration...

...Lead is unsafe to consume at any level, according to the EPA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Ingesting tiny concentrations can permanently damage the developing brains of children and contribute to heart disease, kidney failure and other health problems later in life. A peer-reviewed study published last month in The Lancet, a London-based medical journal, estimated that more than 400,000 deaths a year in the U.S. are linked to lead exposure — or 18 percent of all deaths.

There is no federal standard for the amount of lead found in tap water at individual homes, but studies have reported harmful effects when concentrations exceed the FDA’s standard for bottled water. In a recent peer-reviewed study, EPA scientists cautioned that when children under age 7 drink water containing more than 5 ppb of lead on average, the amount of the metal in their blood can rise above CDC health guidelines...

...“Chicago’s testing blows out of the water one of the foundations of (federal regulations), namely that current lead-in-water monitoring requirements yield reliable information about the extent and severity of contamination across a service area,” Lambrinidou said...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/ct-chicago-water-lead-contamination-20180411-htmlstory.html

Lead concentrations exceeding state standards turned up in: Gaithersburg, Summit Hall, New Hampshire Estates and Pine Crest elementary schools and Eastern Middle School.

Drinking Water Tests Show Heightened Lead Levels at Schools in Silver Spring, Gaithersburg: MCPS is conducting a systemwide analysis of lead in water

New York Changes How It Tests for Lead in Schools’ Water, and Finds More Metal

From New York Times, Feb 3, reporter Kate Taylor. Full story here.

When experts said last year that New York City’s method of testing water in public schools for lead could hide dangerously high levels of the metal, officials at first dismissed the concerns. They insisted that the city’s practice of running the water for two hours the night before taking samples would not distort results.

Still, the city changed its protocol, and the results from a new round of tests indicate that the experts were right.

So far, the latest tests have found nine times as many water outlets — kitchen sinks, water fountains, classroom faucets or other sources — with lead levels above the Environmental Protection Agency’s “action level” of 15 parts per billion as last year’s tests found, according to a report released by the state health department last week.

And in some schools where the earlier tests detected problems, the lead levels identified by the new tests were much worse.

And:

At Intermediate School 27, the Anning S. Prall School, on Staten Island, a first round of tests, conducted in April 2016 after the water had been allowed to run, a practice known as pre-stagnation flushing, found six outlets with lead levels above the E.P.A. threshold. The highest level was found in water from a classroom faucet, where the lead concentration was 49 parts per billion.

When the school’s water was retested in December without letting the water run, 53 outlets had lead levels above the E.P.A. threshold. Fourteen had levels over 1,000 parts per billion, including a fountain with a lead concentration of 3,680 parts per billion, and a classroom faucet with a lead level of 32,500 parts per billion.

And:

“This result illustrates how pre-stagnation flushing can mask serious lead in water problems in schools,” Marc Edwards, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech who helped uncover elevated lead levels in the water in Flint, Mich., said in an email. “I applaud their retesting in a manner that better reveals the widespread scope of the contamination and health concern.”

Although no level of exposure to lead is considered safe, Professor Edwards said that any tap providing water with a lead level of more than 400 parts per billion represented “an acute health risk” to young children.

Water absorbs lead when it sits stagnant in pipes for long periods of time. For that reason the E.P.A. recommends that schools testing for lead take samples after water has been sitting in pipes for at least eight hours.

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.