Jamia Handy is sitting at a table in the front room of her house. A fan is blowing cool air in from a window. Handy’s watching her three-year-old daughter Jaiah stare at a brightly-coloured picture in a children’s book.
TAPE: (4 SECONDS)
IC: Jamia: “What colour is it?”
Jaiah: “Purple castle.”
Purple castle. It’s a small statement, but it means a lot to this 28-year-old mother of four. A year ago, the physician suggested her daughter be tested for lead at a routine doctor’s visit. The blood test showed Jaiah had a dangerously high lead level of 84. That’s 84 micrograms of lead for every deciliter of blood. Anything above 10 is considered high.
TAPE: (13 SECONDS)
IC: “Her pediatrician hadn’t seen levels as high as hers in 25 years of his practice. (…) They actually showed me the x-ray of her stomach and we saw the actual chips of paint where she may have wiped stuff and put her fingers in her mouth.
It took 68 days in the hospital to get Jaia’s lead level down to 27. She still sees a therapist every month to monitor her development.
TAPE: (14 SECONDS)
IC: “I’ve haven’t seen any major developments or delays. She has all the signs of ADHD and she has the temperamental thing. She is bossy. She is temperamental. She has her temper tantrums. She falls out and when she realizes that you are not paying her any attention she gets back up.”
That might simply be signs of a rambunctious child. But studies show lead poisoning causes cognitive disabilities. Some studies also link lead to violence later in life. Ruth Ann Norton is the executive director of the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning.
TAPE: (28 SECONDS)
IC: What you have to think of is that lead has a neuron toxin, it actually changes the chemical makeup of the brain, it changes the sodium and cretin levels in the brain. In that you have a lot of cellular development which is impeded you have different issues in terms of organ development alike. The same type of changes that you see in the brain from lead are the same changes that you see from people who abuse steroids.
Experts still disagree on what constitutes an acceptable amount of lead in the body. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has established 10 as the level at which action should be taken. The coalition wants to lower that number to five. For now though, if a child in Baltimore tests positive for a lead level of 10 or higher, a home inspection is ordered. At that point, the coalition often gets involved, helping families reduce lead hazards in their homes.
TAPE: (10 SECONDS)
AMBIENCE: Opening window
IC: “Now by opening the window, and every time you open the window, you notice it is creating dust…”
Jay Johnson is standing in the living room of a row house in West Baltimore. He’s the director of lead hazard control at the coalition. He’s here today because he’s replacing the home’s old windows, which are covered with flaking lead paint.
TAPE: (31 SECONDS)
IC: “Here is where it becomes problematic for children. As you open and close the window– and look down here inside of the window well, you see this is a considerable amount of lead dust and paint chips. So if that toddler is coming over to this window just to get some air and happens to put their fingers down in here and then put them inside of their mouth, that is how they typically become poisoned.”
That’s exactly what happened to one of the children who was living here. Annie Scott’s three-year-old great-grandson tested positive for lead poisoning last year.
TAPE: (8 SECONDS)
IC: “He went to the clinic and they checked him and his lead was up to about 10, and that is very high for a child.”
It turns out Scott’s window sills were the culprits. Norton, the executive director, says roughly 105,000 houses in Baltimore have some sort of imminent lead hazard in them. Many are in known hot-spots.
TAPE: (22 SECONDS)
IC: “Sandtown-Winchester, Southwest, Pigtown area. North of the East Baltimore Development Initiative, all of that area. The Oliver area. So, it’s major East and West, Harlem Park. A little bit up to Coppin Heights, Rosemont and down to Southwest.”
Baltimore was the first jurisdiction in America to ban residential use of lead paint. That was in 1951– 27 years before it was banned nationally by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. But as Baltimore’s economy declined in the 1970s, so too did its war on lead. By the 1990s, Norton says the city had the highest concentration of lead poisoned children in the country.
TAPE: (26 SECONDS)
IC: “We fell victim in Baltimore City to what I would call a Chicken Little syndrome, where we allowed landlords to say, ‘Oh my god, if you enforce housing codes, then I will have to board up my property and I will leave. They sky is falling and I can’t do it.’”
And so, enforcement of housing codes in Baltimore was lax. State laws and abatement programs have since helped reduce the number of children with lead poisoning in Baltimore. But some landlords are still able to rent homes with dangerous lead levels. Like the house where Jamia Handy lived. The landlord had made repairs to the house. But he never had it lead-tested afterwards. He never adequately cleaned the house, so the carpet was saturated with lead dust. Just waiting for an unlucky kid to crawl all over it. Handy says the experience left her livid.
TAPE: (13 SECONDS)
IC: “I was very upset. When we found out that the person– the owner of the home– had never seen the home. The house hadn’t even been registered as a rental property. The house was next door to a playground, so I am like, ‘My children will enjoy this house.’”
Today, Handy lives in a different house. It does have lead paint. But it’s in good condition—none of the paint is flaking. In other words, the house is lead safe, if not lead free. Eventually, Handy hopes to move into a newer home that has never been exposed to lead paint. When that happens, she says, she’ll make sure to see documentation that proves the house is lead free before she moves in.
I’m Sarah Richards reporting in Baltimore for 88.1 WYPR.
Jamia Handy is sitting at a table in the front room of her house. A fan is blowing cool air in from a window. Handy’s watching her three-year-old daughter Jaiah stare at a brightly-coloured picture in a children’s book.
Jamia: “What colour is it?”
Jaiah: “Purple castle.”
Purple castle. It’s a small statement, but it means a lot to this 28-year-old mother of four. A year ago, the physician suggested her daughter be tested for lead at a routine doctor’s visit. The blood test showed Jaiah had a dangerously high lead level of 84. That’s 84 micrograms of lead for every deciliter of blood. Anything above 10 is considered high.
“Her pediatrician hadn’t seen levels as high as hers in 25 years of his practice. (…) They actually showed me the x-ray of her stomach and we saw the actual chips of paint where she may have wiped stuff and put her fingers in her mouth.”
It took 68 days in the hospital to get Jaia’s lead level down to 27. She still sees a therapist every month to monitor her development.
“I haven’t seen any major developments or delays. She has all the signs of ADHD and she has the temperamental thing. She is bossy. She is temperamental. She has her temper tantrums. She falls out and when she realizes that you are not paying her any attention she gets back up.”
That might simply be signs of a rambunctious child. But studies show lead poisoning causes cognitive disabilities. Some studies also link lead to violence later in life. Ruth Ann Norton is the executive director of the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning.
“What you have to think of is that lead has a neuron toxin, it actually changes the chemical makeup of the brain, it changes the sodium and cretin levels in the brain. In that you have a lot of cellular development which is impeded you have different issues in terms of organ development alike. The same type of changes that you see in the brain from lead are the same changes that you see from people who abuse steroids.”
Experts still disagree on what constitutes an acceptable amount of lead in the body. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has established 10 as the level at which action should be taken. The coalition wants to lower that number to five. For now though, if a child in Baltimore tests positive for a lead level of 10 or higher, a home inspection is ordered. At that point, the coalition often gets involved, helping families reduce lead hazards in their homes.
AMBIENCE: Opening window
“Now by opening the window, and every time you open the window, you notice it is creating dust…”
Jay Johnson is standing in the living room of a row house in West Baltimore. He’s the director of lead hazard control at the coalition. He’s here today because he’s replacing the home’s old windows, which are covered with flaking lead paint.
“Here is where it becomes problematic for children. As you open and close the window–and look down here inside of the window well, you see this is a considerable amount of lead dust and paint chips. So if that toddler is coming over to this window just to get some air and happens to put their fingers down in here and then put them inside of their mouth, that is how they typically become poisoned.”
That’s exactly what happened to one of the children who was living here. Annie Scott’s three-year-old great-grandson tested positive for lead poisoning last year.
“He went to the clinic and they checked him and his lead was up to about 10, and that is very high for a child.”
It turns out Scott’s window sills were the culprits. Norton, the executive director, says roughly 105,000 houses in Baltimore have some sort of imminent lead hazard in them. Many are in known hot-spots.
“Sandtown-Winchester, Southwest, Pigtown area. North of the East Baltimore Development Initiative, all of that area. The Oliver area. So, it’s major East and West, Harlem Park. A little bit up to Coppin Heights, Rosemont and down to Southwest.”
Baltimore was the first jurisdiction in America to ban residential use of lead paint. That was in 1951–27 years before it was banned nationally by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. But as Baltimore’s economy declined in the 1970s, so too did its war on lead. By the 1990s, Norton says the city had the highest concentration of lead poisoned children in the country.
“We fell victim in Baltimore City to what I would call a Chicken Little syndrome, where we allowed landlords to say, ‘Oh my god, if you enforce housing codes, then I will have to board up my property and I will leave. They sky is falling and I can’t do it.’”
And so, enforcement of housing codes in Baltimore was lax. State laws and abatement programs have since helped reduce the number of children with lead poisoning in Baltimore. But some landlords are still able to rent homes with dangerous lead levels. Like the house where Jamia Handy lived. The landlord had made repairs to the house. But he never had it lead-tested afterwards. He never adequately cleaned the house, so the carpet was saturated with lead dust. Just waiting for an unlucky kid to crawl all over it. Handy says the experience left her livid.
“I was very upset. When we found out that the person– the owner of the home– had never seen the home. The house hadn’t even been registered as a rental property. The house was next door to a playground, so I am like, ‘My children will enjoy this house.’”
Today, Handy lives in a different house. It does have lead paint. But it’s in good condition—none of the paint is flaking. In other words, the house is lead safe, if not lead free. Eventually, Handy hopes to move into a newer home that has never been exposed to lead paint. When that happens, she says, she’ll make sure to see documentation that proves the house is lead free before she moves in.
I’m Sarah Richards reporting in Baltimore for 88.1 WYPR.
Our series, “Growing Up Baltimore,” is made possible, in part, Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence. The findings and conclusions presented in our series do not necessarily reflect the opinions of these organizations.
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Excellent content; well presented. A group of us in Winston-Salem have been working for the last year to raise awareness of lead hazards. Your content hits all the salient points and is consistent with all our research. Baltimore should celbrate its accomplishments and forge on to make all properties lead safe. Empty lots must be considered,too –especially as community gardens begin to flourish.
Our community has just received its first HUD Lead Paint Hazard Reduction Grant. We have an estimated 47,000 housing units with lead–6,700 are high prioriy. We have a long way to go.
We are still reaching the housing second and the children first but ARE reaching more children because we reduced the the threshold to 8ug; our health department(Forsth County) offers investigations at 5 ug. and are recommending that all children age 1 and 2 be tested –not just the high risk children.
Personally, I like the fact that this article comes up with a possibly explanation for the violent behavior in Baltimore City. Hearing the touching story about the young girl who experienced the lead poisoning was the perfect way to start off the article. This got me very interested to know more about her story and what had happened. Then I was even more intrigued as the story continued and showed the possible problems as to how this could have happened to this young girl. Hearing that the problem was caused from the landlord not getting the apartment checked for lead was surprising yet familiar. Knowing that this most likely often happens in Baltimore City, it allowed me to form my own conclusion before even ending the article. Seeing the clear connection of the two issues in Baltimore and the fact that they are both common makes me and all that I talk to very frightened and even more cautious. Knowing that as a child I myself used to bite on the window sills in my own home here in Baltimore City as my mother constantly told me to stop; I was never able to see why. Luckily I was not affected like the girl in the story but I am now positive that I will take precautions and make sure that any other Baltimore city raised children do not end up with a likely fate.
It is suprising, how in such a concise town, which due to the fact the area is in of low income housing, the goverment doesn’t feel as though there is a need to invest in rehabilitating the area. Therefore, the families that reside in the these houses, live their lives daily, not knowing that their bodies are being cause severe harm due to the living conditions of there own home. It if it wasn’t for the parent deciding to get their children checked out for lead poisoning, the child could have died; without even knowing what the cause may have been. It’s scary. Lead is known as a neuro-toxin; meaning, it can change the chemical make-up of the brain, and it changes the sodium levels of the brain as well. There can be a lot of impeded cellular and organ development also. Glad to know now, that when a child is tested for a lead level of either 10 or above, a home inspection is ordered. This way it can help families reduce lead hazards, which is always a better and more effecient outcome.
nice post. thanks.