God knows why kids find the taste of lead paint chips and lead dust appealing. Maybe they wouldn’t if the stuff weren’t prevalent where they live and play.
Earlier this week, folks from CLEARCorps sat in the rear parking lot of Beck’s Hardware on McMillan Avenue in Walnut Hills in the heart of what surely must have once been a bustling, thriving center of life and entertainment. They had two festival-type booths set up for Lead Fest 2000, waiting for neighborhood residents to stop in.
Today, but for Beck’s, a butcher shop, some storefront churches and the occasional bar and mini-mart, the stretch is dotted with dilapidated buildings — some of which people actually live in. So CLEARCorps, a program of the Better Housing League staffed by volunteers from AmeriCorps, was in the perfect spot to educate people about domestic lead poisoning, something many of us might have thought died in the 1950s, ’60s or ’70s with the advent of a supposed higher standard of living.
That’s not the case. More people than we realize — especially children and pregnant women — live in lead-filled houses and apartments.
“It’s still a big problem,” says Amanda Nielson, a CLEARCorps team member. “A lot of kids are lead-poisoned in Cincinnati.”
It takes only 15 micrograms of lead-laced dust to poison a child. That’s like trying to separate a gram of sugar in a 5-pound bag.
Poisoning doesn’t always come from an act as blatant as a kid eating paint chips off the wall or along the windowsill. Lead poisoning can also come from collected dust along a window as a result of friction from the window being raised and lowered. A bottle nipple dipped into that dust, a finger dragged through that dust or food immersed in that dust are all probable scenarios.
“We were at a house yesterday and a kid was dragging a Cheet-O across the floor,” says Kate Beyer, another team member.
Although they’re not licensed to remove lead paint and lead dust, the CLEARCorps members concern themselves with education. They travel the city visiting day cares showing a hilarious Sesame Street video about cleanliness and safety.
During one demonstration, team members Lucius Miller, Jibri McPherson and Beyer showed me how to properly clean a floor and window frames. According to them, water and your average, everyday household cleanser can be mixed. Spray down the window frames to eliminate dust. Wipe the frames with clean water. If you can afford to, replace the troughs — that section at the bottom of the window — where dust collects.
If you’re a parent or landlord and you suspect lead is present in your residence or property, you can schedule a lead inspection by the city’s health department. CLEARCorps members tell me you can assume a 98 percent chance of the presence of lead if your house or property is a pre-1950 building.
Inspectors will use an X-ray gun to measure layers of paint, which of those layers have lead and the amount of lead in the paint. Still, with all the testing and preventative measures, Beyer says there remains just one way to really know if a child has been poisoned.
“The only way to know if a kid is lead-poisoned is a blood test, because the symptoms are other things like stomach pains and people give Pepto Bismol for that,” Beyer says.
It’s weird to be writing about something as medieval as lead poisoning in a time when a click of a button can send a message around the world or around the block. It’s unsettling because it says that people are unaware of how they’re living. Further, we’re unconcerned with how our neighbors live.
And even those who become aware can still avoid doing anything about it.
“A lot of people don’t even know that they’re living in a house with lead paint,” McPherson says. “It’s one reason some parents think their kids have ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). They’ve been living with it so long, and it causes so many other problems” such as lowered IQ, memory problems, aggressiveness, seizures and even brain swelling.
One thought running through my mind as I watched Sesame Street and learned how to properly mop my floors and clean my window sills was this: A low-income, single parent with multiple children living in substandard housing might not feel like dealing with the added responsibility of learning to check for lead. That’s reality.
“It’s not gonna work if they don’t wanna do it,” says team member David Hastings.
Ultimately, he’s right. But can we at least get beyond out-and-out stupidity?
“The most troubling (case) was a guy who didn’t understand the dust part,” Hastings says. “He wanted to rip into walls, which makes the problem worse. There were kids in and out of that place, pregnant women in and out of that place.”
If the adults don’t understand, let’s at least educate the children.
contact Kathy y. wilson: kwilson@citybeat.com
This article appears in Oct 25-31, 2000.