Am I only person who thinks the U.S. government looks demented - I'm thinking a DSM-approved schizophrenia diagnosis - when it comes to the poisonous element lead?
This week - for the first time in 20 years - the U.S. Centers for Disease Control announced that it was lowering the recommended limit of lead exposure for children under six. In fact, it was reducing the so-called safe exposure to almost zero, from 10 micrograms of lead per deciliter in the blood to five micrograms.
In this country, the CDC added, that means that many, many children suffer from some degree of lead poisoning. Under the old standard, the agency estimated that number at up to 250,000. Under the new standard, as The Los Angeles Times points out, the numbers could climb to 450,000.
Wow, you might think. That's a lot of kids at risk, especially since we've long known that lead is an extraordinarily dangerous neurotoxin, capable of doing serious brain damage. As the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning emphasizes, "The harmful effects of lead poisoning are permanent. The only cure is prevention." Naturally, you also think, our federal health agencies will be turning their attention to said prevention.
But here's where the schizophrenic part comes in.
On the one hand, yes, the government is loudly acknowledging that lead is very dangerous for children. But on the other hand, most of these at-risk children are poor. They live in inner city neighborhoods where leaded paint can still be found in aging buildings, where far too many lead pipes still carry water. They live in neighborhoods alongside freeways and interstates where deposits from old-time leaded gasoline exhaust remains. They reside near old or abandoned factories with their legacy of toxic metal waste (a story beautifully told by USA Today in its series Ghost Factories).
And while we know those children are the most vulnerable, our federal government turns out to be very, very reluctant to spend the money to protect them. Especially recently. As I noted (or more accurately, ranted) in an earlier post, this year Congress slashed the funding for the CDC's lead removal program from $29 million to $2 million. "It's a sad irony," that at a time when we're recognizing the danger, we're cutting the funding, the director of the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning told The Huffington Post. No kidding.
The CDC announced the recommendations on Wednesday on a page of its website dedicated to the issue of lead poisoning. If you gohere, you can find the agency's statement as a pdf titled, "CDC Response to the Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Recommendations." And if you read that pdf, what you find is a completely cash-strapped response to the problem.
"The proposed methods to address recommendations are contingent on the availability of resources. In FY 2012 funding for CDC's Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention activities was reduced significantly from FY 2011. As a result, funding is not available for state and local Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Programs." What you'll find if you read further, is that the CDC has a new response to lead protection measures called Concur in principle: "We agree, but we do not have the funding, staff or control over the means to implement the recommendation."
Just to give you one example:
III. Recommendation: CDC should develop and help implement a nationwide primary-prevention policy to ensure that no children in the United States live or spend significant time in homes, buildings or other environments that expose them to health hazards.
Concur in principle.
Or another:
VII. Recommendation: Educate families, service providers, advocates, and public officials on the primary prevention of lead exposure in homes and other child-occupied facilities to ensure that lead hazards are eliminated before children are exposed.
Concur in principle.
In other words, these are great ideas but the agency charged with protecting these children has no money to help them. Despite the fact that studies have shownthat we benefit financially from money invested in lead prevention programs because of reduced costs in everything from health care to special education programs. Despite the fact that, as The Baltimore Sunsaid today, this is a genuine public health crisis, a signal that we should engage in an all out war on lead poisoning.
Instead, we're calling a retreat. Or sending a message - inadvertent, maybe, but undeniable - that we accept that children will be poisoned, that they'll unknowingly eat lead chipping away from old paint, play in leaded soils. And we're sending a message about who we are today. Maybe I am wrong, after all, in calling this behavior demented. Really, it's just sad.
Image: Qole Pejorian/Flickr
