Thursday, April 07, 2016

Mapping the risk of lead poisoning ... in downtown New Albany.





I recommend clicking through and reading the entire article. Thanks to A for the tip.

The risk of lead poisoning isn’t just in Flint. So we mapped the risk in every neighborhood in America, by Sarah Frostenson and Sarah Kliff (Vox)

Neighborhoods where kids face the highest risk of lead poisoning exist all across America.

The trouble is that exposure risk is surprisingly difficult estimate, due to a variety of state-by-state differences in reporting standards. So we worked with epidemiologists in Washington state to estimate risk levels in every geographic area in America.

"As a parent, I found it very alarming," says Holly Davies, who works in Washington's Department of Ecology on lead exposure reduction. "My son was born in West Virginia, and there it was standard practice that at one year they get screened [for lead poisoning risk]. But here it wasn't a standard thing; I was the one who had to bring it up."

The map you'll see below shows the risk of lead exposure across the United States. The areas where kids are at highest risk of lead exposure — an estimate calculated using government data about the surroundings — are scattered all across the country.

These are the bright red areas in the map you see below — the places that public health researchers have identified as having the highest risk of lead exposure. You can see that the vast majority cluster in urban areas.

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