Lead follies in St. Louis.

• Author: Fitz, Don
• Position: Lead: The Poisoning Continues - St. Louis, Missouri

According to Missouri politicians, St. Louis is reducing lead poisoning by over two-thirds and instituting bold programs to remove lead from homes to prevent poisoning. Close scrutiny reveals a very different story. This raises the question: Since every local government is highly motivated to say it is coping with lead poisoning, which claims are real and which are bogus?

On May 8, 2006 St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay invited the public, and, of course, the press, to join him at a "community forum" to celebrate a model home where lead had been removed. In his opening comments, the Democratic Party mayor boasted that the City of St. Louis had achieved a 70% reduction in childhood lead poisoning since 1999. Republican Senator Kit Bond patted himself on the back for bringing millions of federal dollars to St. Louis for "a primary prevention model to keep children from being poisoned in the first place." If these claims were true, then St. Louis would have a record that every other city should seek to copy. Instead of verifying a successful program, they illustrate political manipulation of data to create lead fantasies.

Children as lead detectors

The current lead crisis in the City of St. Louis has deep roots. In 1969, civil rights activist Ivory Perry helped persuade the Board of Aldermen to pass the City's first lead law, designed to force landlords to detoxify rental property. But within a couple of years, Perry realized that the fines were too small and enforcement too lax to make a real impact on children's health.

For the next several decades St. Louis legislators did little. By the turn of the millennium some black neighborhoods had lead poisoning rates as high as 55%.

By this time, lead activists realized that the approach of first finding children that were poisoned and then testing where they lived was terribly inadequate. This ensures that child after child is poisoned. The approach is misnamed "secondary prevention." It would be more accurate to call it "lead poisoning reaction."

Lead activists advocate "primary prevention." This requires removing lead from homes in areas known to have a high rate of lead poisoning.

Closely related is the need for lead abatement using window replacement. Treatment of homes with lead can either be with interim controls, which are temporary fixes such as scraping, repainting, washing and vacuuming, or abatement, which is lead removal. Interim controls last somewhere between a few weeks to a few years before they must be repeated. Abatement is designed to be permanent. It includes window replacement because friction from opening and closing old windows means they are the greatest source of lead dust.

In recent years, the City of St. Louis has come under increasing fire for its inadequate lead program from the St. Louis Lead Prevention Coalition (LPC), Health and Environmental Justice (HEJ) and the Gateway Green Alliance (GGA). It also received critical coverage in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Riverfront Times, St. Louis American, Saint Louis Argus and South City Journal.

In 2003, LPC released an extensive report, Lead Canaries: The Tragic Tradition of Childhood Lead Poisoning in St. Louis. That report charged that the City continues to "use children as lead detectors." The report estimated that abatement, including window replacement, would cost about $9000 per housing unit. Since interim controls cost about $7500 per living unit, it is clearly not cost effective to spend almost as much for a quick fix that will need to be repeated multiple times.

The LPC report also argued that the City needs to "advocate for substantial expansion of federal funds." (p. 12) It compared lead poisoning to the billions of dollars spent on the Superfund program since 1980 and maintained "Superfund sites pose a less direct and immediate threat to human health than the threats...