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This article originally appeared in the July-August 2004 issue of the
Children's Advocate, published by Action Alliance for Children.
"Zero tolerance for lead"
California communities
explore new strategies for reducing childhood
lead poisoning
By Meg Hamill
Gabriela Gonzalez, a mother in South Central Los An-geles, never suspected that she had lead poisoning as a child
until she started a training program for promotoras
de salud (health outreach workers) at the
Esperanza Community Housing Corporation (ECHC). When she found out that
lead in children's blood could cause learning disabilities, something
clicked.
"Even when I was a kid," says Gonzalez, "I had difficulty
learning things. Things didn't stick inside my head." She traces the problem
to the year she was seven, when her whole family renovated a home together-construction work in older homes often fills the air
with dust from lead-based paint, then children breathe it in.
Now Gonzalez's job is to help prevent lead poisoning
in other kids. As a promotora, she says,
"I go door to door doing health surveys and taking dust samples searching
for traces of lead. We are looking
for other ways of finding lead in a home instead of using children as
lead detectors."
Danger: Lead in blood
The program Gonzalez works in, Healthy Homes/Hogares Saludables,
is one of the community-based programs around
California experimenting
with new strategies for preventing childhood lead poisoning.
These efforts took on more urgency after last year's
reports of new research showing that even very low levels of lead in the
blood can affect children's intelligence. Previously experts thought a
child was safe with a score of 10 or lower on the scale used for measuring
blood lead level.
But researchers found that lead levels lower than 10
can harm children's ability to learn. Lead poisoning can also cause behavior
problems. Researchers now say there's no safe level of lead in blood.
Most childhood lead poisoning is caused by lead-based paint, outlawed
in 1978 but still present in most older homes.
Los Angeles:
Healthy Homes/Hogares Saludables
In L.A.'s
Healthy Homes/Hogares Saludables
program, Gonzalez and other promotoras
go door to door, checking for housing conditions that cause lead poisoning,
asthma, and other illnesses. They give families coupons for free lead
tests at the St. John's Wellness
Center, and "explain to the
families just what those tests mean," says Nancy Ibrahim, associate director of ECHC. "We take a zero tolerance
stance on lead. We are outraged that families are told that a level of
nine or ten is safe."
If lead is found in the house dust or the children's
blood, promotoras teach the families how to reduce the lead
hazard, says Ibrahim, by damp-mopping instead
of sweeping, and using ECHC's special anti-pollution
vacuum cleaners.
Meanwhile, ECHC refers the family to a partner organization,
Strategic Action for a Just Economy, where they can learn about tenant
rights and about how to get their landlord to make needed repairs.
San Diego:
Safer school site
In San Diego,
residents of the Logan Heights
neighborhood have been organizing to prevent their new school from being
built on land contaminated with lead and other hazards. Last fall, in
a victory for the community campaign, the board of the San
Diego Unified School
District stopped work on its new Laura
G. Rodriguez
Elementary School until it
could develop a better clean-up plan.
The school district had a plan for cleaning up the school
site, which had once held a waste incinerator, with a former landfill
nearby. But the Environmental Health Coalition, a nonprofit environmental
justice organization, says that plan didn't call for enough soil testing
and would allow too much lead to remain after the cleanup.
So EHC community organizers started knocking on doors,
explaining the problem. "People are interested in this issue because it
affects their children's health," says organizer Luz Palomino. "They had been receiving information in the
mail about the new school, but no one had told them that the site wasn't
clean."
Residents crowded into school board meetings last fall,
says Leticia Ayala, EHC campaign director, "and said:
'Hey, there's a huge potential of putting children at risk from
these contaminants."
The school board has since made a plan that calls for
better testing of the site, but it would still allow lead to remain in
the soil. So residents are continuing their campaign for a cleanup that
would leave no lead in the soil.
San Francisco:
Landlords on board
It's important to educate families, says Neil Gendel, project director of the Healthy Children's Organizing
Project (HCOP) in San Francisco,
but removing lead hazards is "a question of changing the behavior of those
who are causing the risk." In San Francisco,
he says, that's mainly owners of rental housing.
So at the insistence of HCOP and other community groups,
as part of a "comprehensive ordinance to prevent childhood lead poisoning,"
the San Francisco Board of Supervisors 12 years
ago created a Lead Hazard Reduction Citizens
Advisory Committee (LHRCAC), where building owners sit down with tenant
representatives, contractors, and advocates to figure out solutions.
"At first it was difficult," says Gendel,
but slowly the groups got used to working together. The Apartment Owners
Association started holding classes for its members on reducing lead hazards,
and in 1997 the first LHRCAC-sponsored legislation passed, requiring lead-safe
repair methods on building exteriors.
Even before she joined the LHRCAC, painting contractor
Frances Doherty was already working to reduce lead contamination. After
she gave birth to her son Owen in 1991, she took a course on lead hazards
in painting and construction. As a contractor exposed daily to lead based
paint, she realized the risk to her children and took them to get tested.
Her newborn son had a blood lead level of 10.
"After that," says Doherty, "we changed how we did business.
[For example,] we used to burn lead paint off, grind it, sand it, and
leave behind dust and paint chips." After
she adopted safer methods, she says, "I nearly went out of business. Our
clients didn't want to pay extra for all the precautions."
But Doherty persisted, and now she won't be alone. This
year the San Francisco supervisors
passed another LHRCAC ordinance, this one requiring lead-safe work practices
in building interiors too.
Resources:
- Esperanza Community Housing Coalition, 213-748-7285
- Environmental Health Coalition, 619-235-0281
- Healthy Children Organizing Project, 415-777-9648
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New state law: tool for local action
A few years ago, the Esperanza
Community Housing Cor-poration (ECHC) in Los
Angeles got an urgent call from a mom named Norberta. She had learned about the dangers of lead paint
from an ECHC promotora, and how her three-year-old
son was out riding his tricycle in clouds of dust, as workers sanded paint
from a house.
At that time L.A.
authorities weren't telling landlords to re-move lead hazards unless a
child living in the building had a blood-lead level of 15 or 20. (Recent
research shows that even a level lower than 10 can cause learning disbilities.)
So ECHC began a "long battle," says associate director
Nancy Ibrahim, for a state law that would allow
cities to order cleanup of lead hazards before any kids got poisoned.
A statewide coalition of health, housing, and environmental organizations
last year won passage of a bill, SB460, that makes it a crime to create
lead hazards, says Ibrahim, "and gives every local agency the authority-and the
responsibility-for stopping it."
The law doesn't force local governments to take action,
points out Neil Gendel, project director of
San Francisco's Healthy Children
Organizing Project. "It needs the vigilance of all of us," Ibrahim
acknowledges, "being activists and yammering for enforcement."
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