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Eleven New Jersey cities and several cities in Michigan have higher rates of lead poisoning than Flint, “again, not from the water but old paint and soil contaminated by factory emissions from yesteryears,” The Washington Post explained.
How could it get worse than Flint?
Nearby cities report more children with lead poisoning https://t.co/xtqgt6AslZ pic.twitter.com/aDqUMH6Nbj
— Yahoo News (@YahooNews) January 29, 2016
Louisiana, Alabama, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana and Oklahoma are just some of the other states that have counties with lead levels higher than Flint’s, according to Vox. One county in Alabama—Houston County—found that seven of the 12 children it tested had lead poisoning in 2014, which the CDC defines as kids who have more than five micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood.
In some places outside of Flint, more than half of children test positive for lead poisoning https://t.co/X4PD5LpUkQ pic.twitter.com/amIWndkLIS
— Vox (@voxdotcom) January 28, 2016
As for what’s being done to address the problem, local groups and politicians are working to hold agencies accountable for monitoring lead exposure and trying to get money allocated to remove lead from old homes.
“At a press conference in Trenton, New Jersey, this week, a coalition of groups led by community development nonprofit Isles, Inc. urged Gov. Chris Christie to devote $10 million towards the Lead Hazard Control Assistance Fund, which oversees the removal of lead from old homes and other lead abatement projects,” The Washington Post reported.
In Ohio, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown announced last week he will introduce legislation to address the threat of lead exposure in the water supply after news broke of lead poisoning in the tap water of residents of Sebring, Ohio. Brown criticized the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency for failing to tell Sebring residents for five months that their water was contaminated with lead.
The new legislation would require the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to notify the public of dangerous lead levels in their water within 15 days, and to put a cleanup plan into place within six months. The current law gives the state Environmental Protection Agency 18 months to enact a corrosion control plan to clean up lead from toxic water supplies, Sen. Brown told The Plain Dealer.
We are seeing effects of lead in water in Flint, Sebring & other cities across the US. Current efforts aren’t enough https://t.co/HL9jciQXQ0
— Sherrod Brown (@SenSherrodBrown) February 3, 2016
Cleveland City Council also held its third hearing since December on the city’s lead poisoning problem. “The main task the city faces is sorting through a backlog of 3,000 lead poisoning cases identified by the Ohio Department of Health that have yet to be entered into the state’s tracking system,” the Plain Dealer reported.
Overall, “monitoring of lead exposure is hugely inadequate—even though it remains a significant problem, especially in the country’s most vulnerable communities,” Vox said. While blood lead levels have decreased dramatically in the last few decades, it’s still a serious problem.
“There is no standard for how states should administer their childhood lead surveillance programs, and testing isn’t mandatory, despite the fact that,” according to Vox, “the CDC has said ‘no safe blood level in children has been identified.'”
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