News Coverage
Danger of lead lurking in Ohio
Thousands of youths exposed to old paint remain undiagnosed
Published May 3, 2004
Ohio may have a bigger-than-expected problem with lead poisoning in children.
A report released today by a national environmental group says 70 percent of the nearly 19,000 children across the state who suffer from lead poisoning have not been identified.
More needs to be done to find the 13,329 Ohio children who likely have troublesome levels of lead in their blood but have not been tested, says the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Working Group.
Those cases of undiagnosed lead poisoning include 727 children in Summit County and 530 children in Stark County.
Exposure to lead-based paint and paint dust in older homes and apartments can reduce intelligence and cause major behavioral and medical problems.
Karen O'Connor, a spokeswoman for the Akron Health Department, said health experts agree that more testing for lead is needed.
Akron officials would like to test 60 percent of its youngsters, up from the current 20 percent, O'Connor said, but that would cost more, and financial resources are limited.
So the city is focusing its efforts on identifying cases in certain high-risk, inner-city neighborhoods, where as many as 23 percent of the children have lead problems, she said. Citywide, one child in 10 in Akron has lead problems.
Karen Hughes, chief of the Ohio Department of Health's Bureau of Child and Family Health Services, said each year Ohio tests about 100,000 children, mostly under the age of 6, and getting lead-poisoning cases identified is a priority.
New state laws call for all children receiving Medicaid benefits and children living in high-risk ZIP codes to be tested more frequently. Hughes said that's likely to result in a larger number of cases being identified.
Overall, in 2002 Ohio identified 5,669 children with lead problems, including 160 in Summit County and 64 in Stark.
More than half of the state's children with lead poisoning -- an estimated 10,400 -- were found in Ohio's seven urban counties: Cuyahoga, Franklin, Hamilton, Lucas, Montgomery, Summit and Stark.
But Arianne Callender, Environmental Working Group's analyst and general counsel, said there is evidence that lead poisoning is also a problem in the rural counties in southeast Ohio.
Statewide, only one in seven children is tested for lead exposure, she said, and no Ohio county tested more than 30 percent of its youngsters.
The Environmental Working Group's new estimate of the number of Ohio children likely to have lead problems is based on an examination of federal and state health records from 2000 to 2002.
The lead study was funded by by the Gund Foundation, and looked only at Ohio, Callender said.
The report estimated that lead poisoning costs Ohio $230 million a year in medical treatment, special education and lost income.
Callender said six Ohio HMOs, including Akron's SummaCare, are prepaid for Medicaid screening of nearly half of Ohio's children expected to have lead problems.
But the HMOs are only testing a small percentage of Medicaid-enrolled youngsters, she said, and that needs to improve with pushes from medical providers and parents.
In 2002, SummaCare tested about 35 percent of its Medicaid-covered youngsters for lead, up from 30 percent a year earlier, said spokeswoman Carrie Ann Massucci.
The EWG report is available online at www.ewg.org.