Flaws in Reporting on Lead

From Alliance Alert, the electronic newsletter from the Alliance for Healthy Homes: The March 2009 issue of Pediatrics featured research by a team of CDC scientists on trends in blood lead levels and BLL testing based upon national survey data. The study showed few surprises, with a continuing decline in the number of children with a BLL greater than or equal to the CDC’s level of concern, 10μg/dL, but with substantial disparities remaining, especially amongst non-Hispanic black children, who continue to have the highest rate of lead poisoning. An Associated Press story describing the research and picked-up by newspapers around the country, however, wrongly stated that the study showed racial disparities to be largely nonexistent, and in the view of many advocates generally discounted lead poisoning as an ongoing problem.

In addition to the misstatement in regards to racial disparities, many advocates noted that the AP article failed to report on the percentage of children with levels over 5μg/dL or over 2.5μg/dL. While both the Pediatrics article and the AP story note there is no safe level of lead, the emphasis was clearly placed on reporting the percentage of children exceeding CDC’s now sadly outdated level of concern. Using a level of 5, the current level of concern in Vermont, Cleveland, and Chicago, the study showed 7.4% of children exceeding it, with an additional 23.6% of children having a blood lead level between 2.5 and 5.

The Alliance hopes future studies and reporting will do more to highlight the importance of eliminating the remaining racial and socio-economic disparities, as well as the importance of preventing all lead exposures, not just those which occur to children will blood lead levels over 10.