There’s no safe level of lead in children’s bloodstreams. But up until now, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) made families stay put in publicly funded housing unless their children’s blood levels rose above 20 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood.
That’s about to change. On Friday, HUD announced a final rule that will lower its threshold for action to 5 micrograms per deciliter, bringing it in line with the level that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has determined to be cause for intervention. This is the first update to HUD’s criteria since 1999.
The new rule will mean that a family living in either public housing or an apartment for which they get public assistance, whose child tests at or above that level, will now be able to get help.
“By aligning our standard with CDC’s guidance, we can respond more quickly in cases when a child who lives in federally assisted housing shows early signs of having elevated levels of lead in their blood,” HUD Secretary Julián Castro said in the announcement.
Once a child in publicly funded housing receives a blood lead test above the 5 micrograms threshold, the new rule says the landlord must test the home within 15 days. The landlord will then have 30 days to make sure that any sources of lead, such as paint or soil, are under control.
The rule applies to all of the 3 million housing units that were built before 1978, the year the United States banned lead-based residential paint.
Public health advocates have raised other concerns about HUD’s regulations that still haven’t been addressed yet, particularly the lack of measures that could help prevent lead poisoning in the first place, since the damage is irreversible.
Although HUD requires that a home be visually inspected before a family with children moves in, these inspections frequently don’t identify all the potential hazards. The visual inspection requires someone to look for peeling or chipping paint, but they can miss a lot of other sources, including dust. Meanwhile, the certification process for inspectors is incredibly lax.
The problem has long been known: a 1994 Government Accountability Office report found that visual inspections were missing a lot of lead, especially in floors and windows — windows being one of the most common sources of poisoning. It recommended that HUD conduct a pilot project with more rigorous inspections, but so far nothing has changed.
Last February, 30 groups sent a petition to HUD to not just lower its threshold for intervention once a child is lead poisoned, but also to do more rigorous risk assessments before children move in, and to allow families to get clearance and assistance for emergency moves if there’s a lead hazard in their home. Congress followed up on it in March; Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Reps. Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Mike Quigley (D-IL) introduced legislation that would have matched HUD’s lead threshold to the CDC’s while also requiring robust inspections and emergency moves.
In statements on Friday, Durbin and Menendez applauded the new rule but also vowed to push for more.
Castro will soon be leaving HUD, and President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Ben Carson to lead the agency. In his written opening statement for his confirmation hearing on Thursday, Carson talked in depth about the health hazard of lead paint in housing.
“I can tell you that lead poisoning irreversibly affects brain and nervous system development, resulting in lower intelligence and reading disabilities… Deteriorating paint in older homes is the primary source of lead exposure for children, who ingest paint chips and inhale lead-contaminated dust,” he wrote.
However, he didn’t use the script when he spoke before Congress and appears to have plagiarized some of this section.
Lead poisoning became front page news last year when the town of Flint, Michigan realized it had been drinking lead-tainted water for years. But the most common source of poisoning is actually residential paint. The country has made steady progress in eradicating the health threat; the share of children with blood lead levels of 10 micrograms per deciliter or more fell 84 percent after lead paint was banned. Less than 1 percent of children who get tested have levels that high.
But despite the evolving research showing the dangers of lead to children’s development, there are still about a half million children between the ages of one and five with blood lead levels of 5 micrograms per deciliter or more.