The highest blood lead levels are seen in children living in denser population areas at or below poverty thresholds. Homes in these largely urban, low-income areas are disproportionately built before 1978 and subject inhabiting children to a significantly higher lead exposure risk. In 2014, it was estimated that 90 percent of all DC homes were built before 1978.
Despite Baltimore leading the charge to inform the public concerning the risks of environmental exposure to lead by banning lead-based paint (but not plumbing or other construction products) in 1951 following a clinical study from Johns Hopkins University, many Baltimoreans, primarily Black, continue to face excessive exposure to lead. The US would not follow Baltimore's example and ban lead-based paint until 1978, because lead lobbyists continued to disrupt regulation efforts.
Lead remediation is an expensive process and even with programs that help or completely cover the costs, many people may not be aware of the programs to take advantage of them.
You can start to see why the problem disproportionately impacts the Black population.
Because the strategy is elimination, lead remediation is a huge expense and has driven landlord behavior to embrace incredulous ignorance. There’s actually an incentive to not maintain property in some cases - remediation may exceed the value of the property.
A smarter strategy imo would be to reduce harm. Do stuff like pay landlords to replace windows and paint trim to encapsulate older lead paint. In poor neighborhoods, you could use this to incentivize section 8 enrollment which gives the government more power to drive other remedies for different problems.
I grew up in an 1890s home and live in a circa 1918 home today. There is almost certainly lead present in both the water supply lines and in various painted structures. Because the homes were/are maintained and the water system isn’t run by criminally negligent people, my kids do not have any lead exposure.
In my city, if I pull a permit for any type of work, it triggers a bunch of nonsense including licensed remediation, etc. Depending on the inspector and the contractor, that could be a big deal.
I have genuine, actual trouble maintaining faith in humanity when I hear about people like this existing. It just makes me incredibly depressed and bummed out about life.
That’s because a few IQ points in black and poor people is not considered more important than not using tax money to solve the problem.
Arguably, the added IQ points times the number of people affected would most likely have a positive effect on the GDP and would pay for the fix in a couple decades.
That we even think that we’d need to do the math to justify it is deeply depressing.
1) alter representation in poorer neighborhoods, as in, black people wouldn't be so heavily represented, but then you would still have the problem of somebody being exposed to lead paint and apathetic landlords
2) the additional demand would wind up pushing people to the bad neighborhoods anyway, some part of me thinks getting right back to square one, but there are a ton of variables there. (Like maybe the higher prices would have incentivized more developers, or even the landlords of bad buildings to renovate)
the outcome that has occurred is still messed up. a lot of race based discrimination in the US against black people has had an economic rationalizing, I wonder if the increased pricing was a factor, alongside more clear cut segregationist idea.
Europeans go what? I'm thinking of all my friends and family and out of hundreds of houses I've been in I can only think of a handful that were built after 1978. I'm not sure why lead isn't a problem so much though, maybe phased out earlier? .
> With whites as the reference group, the odds of consuming soda was 3.1 times higher for U.S.-born blacks (95% CI 2.6–3.7), 2.4 times higher for Puerto Ricans (95% CI 1.9–3.0), and 2.9 times higher for Mexican/Mexican-Americans (95% CI 2.0–4.1). Those living in households with income less than 200% of the federal poverty level were more likely (odds ratio [OR] = 1.7, 95% CI 1.4–2.1) to be frequent soda consumers than those in households earning 600% or more of the poverty level.
[0] https://www.consumerreports.org/food-safety/arsenic-and-lead...
Cursory research shows that might be the case(regarding lower income consuming more fruit juice):
> By contrast, the highest 100% juice consumption was found among children, racial/ethnic minorities and lower-income groups.
https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2...
I wouldn't be surprised if people who have difficultly affording/accessing fruit would think juice was "at least some form of fruit". The packaging often seems to be designed explicitly to mislead us into thinking that way.
The shelf life of juice is easily in its favor too. Normally, I have easy access to fresh produce and in our house it's about even odds that fruit will go bad before it's eaten and I don't have the stresses and struggles of a low income household with children that could make that even worse. If I were on a very tight budget it might be hard to justify the expense on something you're likely to throw away.
>examined risk factors; survey years; binary gender; bodyweight; low birthweight; anemia; health insurance coverage; Medicaid/CHIP enrollment; federal Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) supplemental food program enrollment; use of water treatment devices; b age in months; c educational attainment less than 9th grade education; d housing built before 1960 or 1940; e number of cigarettes smoked inside the home per day (1 to 40 or more); f poverty-to-income ratios
I don't see traffic proximity aka urbanicity aka leaded gasoline particulate pollution in there.
Lead plumbing and lead paint are two factors. But there is lead all through the soil and air as well.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-55330945 (Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah: Air pollution a factor in girl's death, inquest finds)
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/16/girls-de...
>A highly significant association was found between lead exposure and children's IQ (P < 0.001)... There was no evidence that the effect was limited to disadvantaged children and there was a suggestion of the opposite.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8162884/
That's a 1994 meta-study that turned up in 30 seconds of googling, and I'm sure more recent evidence also exists.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7084658/