LEAD'S TOXIC TOLL: Detroit's goal:
End poisonings

National experts to convene in city to help it create a plan

September 22, 2003

BY WENDY WENDLAND-BOWYER
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

The Detroit Health Department is bringing some of the nation's top lead poisoning experts to town Tuesday and Wednesday to help create a plan to eliminate childhood lead poisoning by the year 2010.

The city has hired a nationally known lead-fighting group, the National Center for Healthy Housing, to help write the plan by June. The Columbia, Md.-based group helped Rhode Island create a similar plan and will send representatives to this week's conference.

Also present will be the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lead-poisoning prevention division. Dr. Mary Jean Brown said she will challenge the city to do more to prevent lead poisoning by making better use of its data, a problem highlighted by the Free Press in a July article.

In reports beginning in January, the Free Press has chronicled the pervasive problem of childhood lead poisoning, detailing improper testing and cleanups of lead smelters, government mismanagement of federal lead-removal grants and a lack of city and state leadership, among other things.

Gwendolyn Franklin, director of community field services for the Detroit Health Department, said city leaders are listening. The city won a $700,000 grant from the CDC this summer -- the largest the city has ever received for prevention -- to pay for devising the plan and other new efforts.

"We are responding to the challenge that was given to us by the Detroit Free Press," Franklin saidlast week. "You brought out a lot of points about how us, as leaders, how we need to be better coordinated and have a road map of where we want to go. Right now, we in Detroit . . . don't have that coordination. But we do have a lot of enthusiastic people working on many things."

Each year in Michigan an estimated 22,000 children are lead-poisoned. About two-thirds of them live in Detroit. Lead is of greatest threat to children under age 6. Their neurological systems are developing and they are more likely to put contaminated objects into their mouths. Lead poisoning causes permanent brain damage.

After the Free Press began highlighting the issue:

Gov. Jennifer Granholm unveiled a state lead-fighting plan in August. Michigan Surgeon General Kimberlydawn Wisdom is hosting a series of town hall meetings and a number of new initiatives are in the works, including legislation to create a lead-safe housing registry and enact criminal or civil fines for property owners who knowingly fail to fix a home that poisoned children.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is supervising the removal of lead-contaminated soil in a northeast Detroit neighborhood near a former lead smelter. The EPA never finished its cleanup of the Master Metals lead smelter and never properly sampled the neighborhood around it. The Free Press hired a soil expert who found high lead levels.

The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality is planning to test the soil near a dozen former lead smelters and foundries the EPA learned about more than a year ago. The Free Press reported in April that the state had done nothing to investigate the sites. Soil sampling is expected to begin in October.

The city held its first environmental health fair in northeast Detroit this month, an event it hopes to duplicate elsewhere.

At Tuesday's conference, the CDC's Brown will focus much of her talk on prevention.

"I'm going to talk about how, over a 10-year period, there were 650-some houses that resulted in 1,500 cases of children with blood lead levels of 20 or higher" in Detroit, Brown said. "This points to the need . . . to address residential lead hazards in houses where children have been poisoned in the past."

A child is considered lead poisoned when the blood lead level is 10 micrograms per deciliter, but research research shows problems at levels as low as 5.

Franklin said the Health Department is using its grant to put a greater focus on prevention. In August, the city sent 56 health workers to every house in one of Detroit's east-side neighborhoods with high numbers of lead-poisoned children. The workers explained what lead poisoning is, presented information on available grant money to remove lead in housing and offered information about getting children tested.

The city will repeat the door-to-door approach, Franklin said. Plus, the city is increasing a focus it started late last year to visit pregnant women who are on Medicaid to help safeguard their homes against lead hazards.

Also, the Health Department is planning a new program to visit the homes of parents whose children have blood lead levels of 5 micrograms per deciliter, and keep levels from climbing.

"We are serious. We know so much more about lead poisoning than we knew 10 years ago," Franklin said. "We want to make ourselves obsolete. We want all children in the city of Detroit to be lead-free."

Contact WENDY WENDLAND-BOWYER at 313-223-4792 or wendland@freepress.com.

To do directly to the Detroit Free Press Article, click on this link: http://www.freep.com/news/childrenfirst/lead22_20030922.htm