Lead Poisoning Levels in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County Highest in Ohio

Cleveland, OH is experiencing one of the worst lead poisoning crises in the country–more than 350 cases reported per year.

Plain Dealer reporters Brie Zeltner and Rachel Dissell discovered that more than 2,500 lead cases were investigated, and hazards were found more than 65 percent of the time. The situation in Cleveland could be compared to that occurring in Flint, MI, although the two stem from different sources.  

David Singer, an assistant geology professor at Kent State, has begun an investigation concerning the lead contamination of urban soils in Cleveland. While his focus is on soil, he explains that combinations of several factors have caused elevated blood lead levels among Cleveland residents. For example, a history of industrial activity, automobile exhaust, lead gasoline–during the 1930’s and into the late 70’s–lead in soil and lead paint in older infrastructures.

“In places like Cleveland, there is a direct correlation between the blood lead levels of children and how much lead is in the soils or the air in the areas that they’re living in,” Singer says.

The safety and prevention of high blood lead levels in children has become a priority for Cleveland. The exact number of children at risk is unknown, but an analysis conducted by Ohio State University suggests in some instances more than 4-in-10. According to the New York Times, Cleveland tested less than half of its population under six-years-old.

Over 69 schools within the Cleveland municipal school district tested their facet and fountain water–over 1,700 total. Results showed that nine percent had elevated lead levels. The school district plans to replace all 582 water-dispensing fixtures.

Unfortunately, students are not only exposed to lead at school, but also at home. Especially, if they live in an older home that was built before 1978–the year the federal government banned lead paint for residential use. A second priority is remediating lead paint from old homes, especially where children reside. Although the city working to strip older homes of paint and educating homeowners has decreased the number of lead toxicity levels in Cleveland children, it remains a constant issue.

In Cuyahoga County, 80 percent of the housing was built before 1978, and in Cleveland that number is nearly 90 percent, according to Clevelandfed.org. Since peeling paint from these homes can be ingested into the body through the skin and air, more and more children in these areas are susceptible to the symptoms of lead poisoning. The effects that large amounts of lead can have on children can be very serious and irreversible. Among the 88 counties in the state, Cuyahoga has the highest level of lead poisoning among tested individuals. In 2014, nearly half of the children who were tested with elevated levels of lead in their blood lived in Cuyahoga County.

Cleveland.com reported the results of data concerning the performance of the state’s health districts, which showed thousands of children’s lead poisoning cases were uninvestigated and over 1,000 homes remain known hazards.

According to Singer, even with the remediation efforts to remove lead paint from homes, lead particles would end up in the soil, resulting high blood lead levels in children.

“… soils themselves either being used for gardening, or just a general exposure people have to soil whether it’s through indirect or direct ingestion,” Singer says. “And sometimes they’ll do it indirectly when it gets on their hands and if you don’t fully wash your hands, those little dirt particles on your hands, you could consume that. Or on a windy day, if the wind picks up some dust from soils then you can inhale them as well.”

A key piece of information is the chemical reactivity of the lead and how it will react when combined with other elements. Singer is focusing his investigation on aspects of chemical reactivity in lead in soil and in what neighborhoods it poses the greatest threat.

“The lead that comes from different sources have different reactivity. So you might have a soil with less total lead in it, but if it’s a very reactive form it might actually pose a greater risk versus soils that have lots of lead but is actually pretty unreactive in that the exposure risk is a little bit lower,” he says.

According to local research, experts and researchers at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) have studied the impact lead poisoning have had on Cuyahoga County, while examining the relationship between elevated blood-lead levels and school readiness among children attending Universal Pre-K (UPK) in Cuyahoga County:

“Lead-poisoned children fare worse on assessment tests. Children in the study were tested on school readiness concepts in both the Fall of 2012 and in the Spring of 2013. Children were grouped in three categories based on lead levels: no lead test in Ohio Department of Health data; children with a confirmed elevated blood lead level greater than 0 μg/dL but less than 5 μg/dL; and children with a confirmed elevated blood lead level of greater than or equal to 5 μg/dL. Their analysis shows that while all three groups experienced gains on the school readiness tests from the Fall to the Spring, children with elevated blood lead levels (>=5 μg/dL) exited UPK behind their other two peer groups. In fact, children in the ‘high lead test’ group (>=5 μg/dL) exited UPK in the Spring with lower scores than the ‘no lead test’ group entered with in the Fall, for each of the five school-readiness concepts. For example, on the number component of the assessment, the ‘no lead’ group scored 70.7 on the test in the Fall while the ‘high lead test’ group scored 59.2 in the Spring test (Clevelandfed.org).”

The impact of lead in these areas is going far beyond the purely physical and now into the mental abilities of these young children in the area.