Poisoning Urban Children: White Privilege and Toxic Lead
By Peter Montague and Maria B. Pellerano
For Christmas this year, Congress gave the nation's urban children a gift that will
keep on
giving -- a 94% cut
in funds for lead-poisoning prevention. Once a child is poisoned by
toxic lead,
permanent brain damage reduces I.Q., lowers grades in school, and
diminishes
self-control. This, in turn, can lead to frustration, a sense of
failure,
impulsiveness, aggression, and, for some, violence, crime, and prison. For decades, "conservatives" in
Congress have ignored the problem of urban children poisoned by toxic
lead.
This is one of the reasons why the U.S. currently holds one out of every
100
adults behind bars (2.3 million prisoners total). (More on lead and prisons in a
moment. [Needleman,
2002 ;
Wilkinson, 2003 ;
Masters, 1997])
Lead is
a soft, grey
metal with many practical uses,
from
bathroom pipes to bullets. Unfortunately, it is highly toxic to humans. Despite eons
of knowledge about
the toxicity of lead, during most of the 20th century Congress allowed
the
paint and gasoline industries to lace their products with millions of
tons of the stuff, which of course ended up in the environment where
much of it still
remains available to poison unsuspecting children. Urban neighborhoods are full of lead
today, in soil and in paint flaking off old buildings. Low-income families are hardest hit
because
they tend to live in old buildings poorly maintained.
With a peculiar mix of frugality and cruelty, Congress's $1 trillion
spending
bill for 2012 shrank a small ($30 million per year) federal
lead-poisoning-prevention program to a minuscule $2 million annual
effort, a
94% cut. And it's no surprise to anyone that the children harmed by this
grinch
move are mostly city kids, which means they're mostly African-American
and
Hispanic. The nation's medical establishment has been reporting
excessive lead
in urban children (75% of them of color) since 1952 (Williams, 1952) -- so we have 59 years of
studies, all showing the same thing. Therefore, in this rare instance,
Congress
relied on the best available science and knew exactly what it was doing.
It was
saddling hundreds of thousands of urban children with persistent
cognitive
damage and elevated blood pressure for life.
Less than 2 weeks after Congress delivered its toxic Christmas gift, a
federal
Advisory Committee on Lead Poisoning Prevention recommended that the
official
standard for declaring a child poisoned by lead should be cut in half.
The
Advisory Committee
on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention of the Centers for Disease
Control and
Prevention (ACCLPP) issued its report Jan.
4,
recommending that the official definition of "elevated blood lead
levels" should be reduced by half, from its present 10 units to 5. The
definition of a unit is very geeky -- one microgram of lead in one
deciliter of
blood, written ug/dL. A microgram is a millionth of a gram and there are
28
grams in an ounce. A deciliter is a tenth of a liter and a liter is
about a
quart.
Even as it was recommending a standard of 5, the ACCLPP committee
emphasized
that even
5 is not safe. In its report, the Committee repeated several
times that
the only safe level of lead in a child's blood is zero. The main effect
of lead
is to impair cognition, which is usually measured (after age 5) by an
I.Q.
test. Many studies confirm that any amount of lead reduces a
child's I.Q. to some degree. (Binns, 2007 ; Bellinger,
2008b; Canfield, 2003; CDC 2004; Chiodo,
2004;
Needleman, 2004; Rogan, 2003; Schwartz,
1994)
The body of a healthy 2-year-old contains about 10 deciliters of blood
(in
plain English, one liter). (Russell,
1949) At 5
micrograms per deciliter, that child would carry a total of 50
micrograms of
lead in his or her blood. Fifty micrograms is a speck. If you took one
adult
aspirin tablet and crushed it into 8000 equal pieces, one piece would
weigh 50
micrograms. So, yes, lead is a potent poison.
Such "low" levels of lead are harmful because, as the human
body evolved, there just wasn't much lead in the environment, so we
never
evolved ways to detoxify or eliminate it from our bodies quickly. Based on careful analysis of ancient
bones,
several studies have shown that the average lead in the blood of
pre-industrial
humans was 0.016 ug/dL. (Flegal,
1992) Therefore, U.S.
children with 5 ug/dL in their blood have 300 times as much lead as
pre-industrial humans. So
"low" levels of lead, like the recommended 5 ug/dL, aren't really low
at all, in an evolutionary or biological sense.
Medical
researchers have
a pretty clear idea how much lead causes how much brain damage. The
ACCLPP report says that
a
blood-lead level of four ug/dL will reduce a child's I.Q. by two to five
points, with a best estimate of 3.7 points. Reliable studies have shown
that
blood-lead of even two ug/dL will reduce a child's I.Q. by about three
points.
(Canfield, 2003; Lanphear,
2005)
Does a loss of three or four I.Q. points matter?
In 2007, the New York Times
ran a
front-page story describing what it means for a group of children to
lose just
three I.Q. points (Carey, 2007):
"Three points on an I.Q. test may not sound like much," the Times said. "But experts say it
can
be a tipping point for some people -- the difference between a high B
average
and a low A, for instance. That, in turn, can have a cumulative effect
that
could mean the difference between admission to an elite private
liberal-arts
college and a less exclusive public one."
Of course the Times did not
mention
it, but for some children the loss of three I.Q. points could equally
well mean
the difference between a high D average and a low C, with a cumulative
effect
that could mean the difference between staying in school and dropping
out. We
also know that 10% of young men of color who drop out of high school end
up in
prison or in juvenile detention. (Sum,
2009) So three I.Q.
points can mean the difference
between freedom and prison.
Importantly, loss of I.Q. hurts low-I.Q. people more than it hurts
high-I.Q. people.
The average I.Q. is 100, and by definition half of all people have
below-average I.Q.s. If your I.Q. is 130 and you lose 3 points, you're
losing
about 2% of your total capacity. If your I.Q. is 80 and you lose 3
points,
you're losing about 4% of your capacity. So toxic lead
disproportionately
damages those who can least afford to lose brain power.
Some health officials justify the status quo by pointing out that there used to be a lot more toxic lead in people's blood than there is today, and it's true. Thirty years ago, the median blood lead level in pre-schoolers of all races was 15 ug/dL and 88% of U.S. children had more than 10 ug/dL. (Bellinger, 2008b) The estimated average I.Q. loss in those generations is 9.2 points. They are our leaders today, which may help explain why we're in the shape we're in. Unfortunately, reducing the median lead level from 15 to the present 1.9 (chiefly by phasing out lead in gasoline) did not produce a proportionate rise in I.Q. Kids today have a median I.Q. roughly 5 points higher than kids in the 1970s. The reasons for this are complicated but basically there's a greater loss of I.Q. as lead rises from 1 to 10 ug/dL compared to the loss that occurs above 10 ug/dL. (Bellinger, 2008b)
The
ACCLPP estimates
that 450,000 U.S. children currently have 5 ug/dL or more lead in their
blood.
As we've seen, Congress has allocated a total of $2 million in 2012 to
help
these children, which means each child can get $4.45 worth of services.
A
simple pin-prick blood test can cost $10.00, and removing or
encapsulating lead
in a home costs $7000 on average.
In the U.S., there are currently 4 million homes contaminated with
lead-based
paint with young children living in them.
If the entire $2 million lead-poison-prevention budget for 2012
were
spent removing or encapsulating lead in homes, only 285 of the 4 million
homes
could be cleaned in a year. To
clean all
4 million homes would cost $28 billion.
But, as we'll see, the financial return on such an investment
would be
immediate and large.
And it's not like this problem has sneaked up on us. The paint industry openly acknowledged
in the
1890s that lead-based paint was dangerous; in 1897 at least one company,
Aspinall's, was advertising
proudly that its paint "is NOT made with lead and is non poisonous."
The poisoning of children by dust from lead-based paint was first
reported in
medical literature in 1904. Lead-based paint was banned for interior use
in
Australia and most of Europe during the 1920s. The U.S. delayed another
50
years, banning it in 1978. Furthermore,
just
as Europe was phasing out lead-based paint in the 1920s, the U.S. oil
industry introduced toxic lead into gasoline in 1925. (Hernberg, 2000; Silbergeld,
1997) The tailpipes of automobiles then spewed a fine dust of
toxic
lead -- some 30 million tons of it -- from sea to shining sea for the
next 70
years, until Congress finally phased it out slowly between 1973 and
1995. The soil in most U.S.
cities today is still
laced with toxic automotive lead, which kids still track into their
homes. (Urban gardeners beware --
get your soil
tested for lead.)
The problem of urban children poisoned by lead-based paint was first
acknowledged by U.S. public health doctors in the 1930s. The City of
Baltimore
began routine surveillance of lead in children in 1931, finding black
children
poisoned seven times as often as white children. (Hicks, 1970) Reports of large numbers of
children
poisoned by lead-based paint appeared in medical literature in the
1950s. (Williams,
1952 ; Montague, 1992)
Those
early reports all emphasized that lead was mainly a danger to poor,
African-American children living in urban slums. For a society blinded by 350 years of white privilege
in law and custom, a silent epidemic of poisoning affecting mainly
low-income
black families had no political meaning. To judge by Congress's action
in 2011,
it still doesn't.
The
failure to solve the
problem of toxic lead seems particularly odd because billions of dollars
each
year could be gained by eliminating lead from housing. A 2005 policy
statement
from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP,
2005)
reviewed several cost-benefit analyses, all showing that eliminating
lead from
housing would save billions each year because I.Q. translates into
earning
power which, in turn, translates into tax revenues.
Here are some numbers from the Academy's 2005 statement. There are 4
million homes
in the U.S. needing lead removal or encapsulation. At $7000 to clean an
average
home, eliminating the lead paint problem would require a one-time
investment of
$28 billion. The savings would be $43 billion in the first year and each
year thereafter because children with higher I.Q.s tend to get more
schooling and then jobs with higher pay. So lead remediation would pay
for
itself in less than one year and would then save tens of billions each
year
thereafter. (Grosse, 2002 ; Gould, 2009)
An
investment of $28 billion is less than the U.S. has spent every six
months in
Iraq for the past 8 years.
Other recent studies make the same point, but you get the idea --
there's a huge
amount of money to be saved by ceasing to poison our children. (Gould, 2009)
To state the reverse: we are forgoing billions of dollars in income and
taxes
each year in order to keep our urban children poisoned. This is an
astonishing
use of scarce resources, to put it mildly. How can we possibly explain
such a
bizarre national policy?
It must be that, for the U.S. Congress, some things are more important
than
money.
Congress passed a law in 1971 mandating removal of lead-based paint from
housing. The federal government
then
dragged its feet and bungled the task for 20 years. In 1990, Dr. Herbert Needleman, a
well-known
lead expert, told the New York
Times
that, "The Government's record in dealing with this problem is one of
absolute dereliction." (Schmidt, 1990)
In 2012, the situation is even worse.
Why?
Here is a hypothesis grounded firmly in U.S. history: Perhaps many politicians of the past 35 years, both Republican and Democrat, have found it advantageous to keep inner-city kids behind the 8-ball by diminishing their I.Q.s early in life, making them less successful in school, plus making them more impulsive, aggressive, and potentially violent, thus more likely to end up in prison. (Needleman, 2002; Wilkinson, 2003; Montague, 1997; Masters, 1997; Nevin, 2006) From that perspective, exposing urban children to toxic lead could be seen as part of a well-established pattern -- a school-to-prison pipeline, aided by a war on drugs that targets people of color and a private prison industry that kicks back money into election campaigns to promote public policies that keep the jails overflowing. Mass incarceration of blacks in particular has created a legal opportunity to once again discriminate against them in jobs, housing, voting, jury duty, public assistance, educational opportunity, small business loans, and more -- in sum, the "New Jim Crow." (Alexander, 2010) We hope our hypothesis is wrong, but the historical facts speak for themselves.
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A version of this essay appeared on Alternet February 7, 2012.
