A few days later, when we had the full-on lead inspection we'd sprung for, we learned that the bathroom didn't have a shred of lead paint in it. We had lead on our porch, our window troughs (but not sills), the back stairs, and the undisturbed underlayer of paint in one bedroom. Nowhere else. It was a lot, but not as much as I'd feared.
The actual hazards in your old building may be more limited than you think. You won't know until you've had a combination lead inspection (for the presence of lead) and risk assessment (where is that lead getting into dust).
"It's easy to identify the sources of lead in your environment." Verdict: not scary enough.
"You go through a stage," says Howell, recounting the myriad sources of lead — old water pipes, toys from China, candy wrappers from Mexico, the clothes of a a parent working in renovation — where you look around and think "there's nothing safe for my child anywhere."
Quinn Norton, a parent from the Bay Area, calls trying to be lead-safe "forensic parenting." She was frustrated by a fruitless search to figure out why her daughter's lead level was rising, until almost on a whim she used her home test kit on her 1950s bathtub. A friend of mine whose apartment was lead-free eventually tracked the source of her daughter's elevated level to the local playground.
Lead is a widespread environmental contaminant. It's addressable, but the idea that it's always easy to track down the multiple different subtle ways it appears can make parents who are already dealing with lead feel more crazy and those who aren't complacent.
"All lead-poisoned kids are BRAIN DAMAGED. All kids with a level below 10 are totally fine." Verdict: too scary and not scary enough, hinging on an arbitrary number.
Lead is nasty, no doubt about it, and current research keeps finding effects — lost IQ points, effects on attention span, increased cavities — at lower levels, to the point where it's agreed that "there is no safe level." InWe're still not prevention-minded enough to provide resources for lead-hazard abatement until after a kid is deemed "poisoned." fact, it seems that that first jump, from 1 µg/dl to 10, may have more of an effect than the jump from 10 to 20. All effects of lead are irreversible. It is not something to be casual about.
The term "lead-poisoned," however, now means a mind-bogglingly huge range of things. It's applied to all kids with levels over the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's "level of concern," which was dropped from 60 µg/dl to 40 in 1971, 30 in 1978, 25 in 1985 and 10 in 1991. Some cities are now dropping it to 5. This is a good thing, in that except for publicly funded housing we're still not prevention-minded enough to provide resources for lead-hazard abatement until after a kid is deemed "poisoned."
Nonetheless, the effects on a child with a sustained BLL of over 40 — a medical emergency requiring hospitalization — and on one with a short-term level of 7 or 13 are hardly comparable. Suggesting they are the same thing may be counter-productive, since it makes it harder for lead-safety advocates to get beyond the common reaction of "Well, we all had lead levels higher than that when I was growing up, and we came out fine."
It's easy to critique, of course, and harder to say how to do it better. Perhaps my own PSA would go something like this: "Protecting your family from lead: It's not simple, but it doesn't mean you need to be Martha Stewart or the head of a carpenter's union. You've done lots of harder things as a parent."
