Wouldn’t it be nice if I could present a fix for two of our worst problems?
Surveys of voters this campaign season have shown that D.C. residents are most concerned about two issues: crime and education. Cutting crime and improving education have been perennial concernsin every city — small and large — for decades. The problems and debates have migrated to the suburbs. Crime and education are seen as the two most intractable problems of modern America.
But could it be that the way to have a significant impact on both issues has been known for years? And that experts have ignored the causes and solutions? And that D.C. has been the worst city at recognizing and remedying the problem?
In the current issue of Washingtonian magazine, my colleague John Pekkanen compiles a convincing case that lead is poisoning poor children in D.C. Not hundreds of children, as D.C. would have you believe, but thousands of children. And based on research by many experts, Pekkanen reports that lead contamination leads directly to poor performance in school and violent behavior on the street.
“In D.C., as in other cities, some children grow up in lead traps,” Pekkanen writes. “They may drink lead-contaminated water from their pipes. They play in, a sometimes eat, lead contaminated soil in their yards and playgrounds, a decades-old legacy of leaded-gasoline automobile exhaust and lead paint.”
The most obvious source of lead contamination comes from the walls and woodwork of old homes. Pekkanen points out the obvious: Most of the houses built before the 1950s, when leaded paint was common, are in D.C. rather than in the suburbs.
The fact that lead addles the brain has been known since Roman times, when emperors were made stupid by lead in their wine and pewter goblets. In the modern era, scientists showed that lead-based products could poison the brain. Europeans banned it back in the 1920s; Americans took decades to rid paint and gas of lead, thanks to disgracefully successful campaigns by some corporations.
“Lead is the most widespread toxic metal on Earth,” Pekkanen writes.
Pekkanen presents two pieces of startling new information: Amounts of lead in the bloodfar smaller than what feds say is acceptable have been shown to poison young brains; and there is a direct correlation between lead poisoning and crime — direct, one-to-one correlation in study after study.
Pekkanen also presents the same-old-same-old sad tale of how District bureaucrats have ignored the problem of lead poisoning, squandered federal funds sent to clean the lead from old houses, turned their backs on children whose brains have been impaired by lead. Bureaucrats running D.C.’s lead abatement program have left millions in federal dollars on the table; feds are about to cut them off.
Pekkanen’s article offers practical ways to avoid lead and remedy its effects, wherever you live. His advice to D.C.: Appoint a “lead czar” to clean houses and stop poisoning kids.
Get the lead out, improve education and stop the killing? Sounds too easy, but it’s sure worth the try.
Harry Jaffe has been covering the Washington area since 1985. E-mail him at [email protected].
