Chicago's Silent Epidemic: Lead poisoning

MTO's Loreen Targos shows Sandy possible lead hazards in her home.

The inspector took the report to her landlord, Oretha Flumo, who lives in an adjacent property. And that's when the problems began.

First, it was a letter telling her to leave the premises. Then someone put a padlock back fence while she was out. Then another letter, accusing her of violating her lease because she supposedly had drugs in the apartment. Finally, an eviction notice, accusing her of nonpayment and telling her to vacate the premises.

"This is crazy. All because of the lead. They just want me out of here," says Sandy. "You'll see how far people will go just to get out of something."

Flumo, her husband Malik Shakir and their lawyer, David Grissom, declined to be interviewed for this story. When asked about the lead hazards in the apartment, Grissom said he was not informed of any violations and had not read the inspection report.

Loreen, a healthy homes organizer, says that lead hazards like the ones in Sandy's apartment are common on the South and West sides of Chicago. In fact, she says, Chicago's old housing stock about 87 percent of our housing was built before lead paint was outlawed in 1978 - and the cold winters - lead makes paint sticky and was used in places where the weather is harsh - make the city a hotspot for lead hazards. 

"The EPA still judges all of Chicago as a high-risk area. Even the Gold Cost, Lincoln Park - they think they're not at risk, but they are," Loreen says.

Sandy's window-sill. The cracked, peeling paint creates invisible lead dust that is all over the surfaces of her apartment.

And yet lead poisoning isn't something we often hear about. When I first started working on this story, I thought lead poisoning was about not eating paint chips. But lead creates an invisible dust throughout your home. A sugar packet spread over a football field is enough to poison a child. Lead crosses the blood-brain barrier because your body thinks it is calcium. And then it stays there, rerouting the pathways in a child's brain and limiting them for life.

Sandy's son Angel has a blood lead level of 3 micrograms per deciliter (µg/dl). It's not technically considered lead poisoned - that's 10 µg/dl - but no level of lead is safe for children. There's even a big debate raging now about whether the threshold should be changed to 5 µg/dl. 

Loreen says we all have this attitude that lead isn't a problem anymore, something that happens when a problem is mainly affecting poor, minority children. And when you consider that these kids already deal with bad neighborhoods, single-parent families, poorly performing schools - lead is just another problem these communities can't afford.

In fact some economists have valued a single IQ point at $16,809 over a lifetime. For a kid who's lost 5, 10 or 15 IQ points due to lead, that adds up to a huge chunk of change.

And more than just a problem for individual kids and their families, those lost IQ points build up, affecting the whole city. Loreen drew this great little diagram for me, and I've recreated it for you hear with a simple flash animation:

How Lead Poisons Chicago from Megan Cottrell on Vimeo.

The Chicago Department of Public Health is working to combat lead poisoning, even sending out inspectors before kids are poisoned, something that you don't see in other cities. But Loreen says a big part of the epidemic is lack of education and few resources.

"The vast majority of people are still being poisoned by chipping paint and dust on the windows, and nobody knows that that's the area. They know that lead's bad, but if they're living in really bad housing, they already have bigger problems and it's not a priority."

A city inspector is following Sandy's case, making sure the lead hazards in her apartment are resolved. Sandy says even though the whole process has been incredibly stressful, she's glad she's gone through it, if only to save another family from dealing with the same thing, not knowing the hazards their children face.

"I'm fighting for my rights," she says. "They just want to move me out of here and put another family back in here without fixing anything. That's not right. I'm not gonna let that happen."