"Here comes the 'Lead Man'!"
That's how residents of Baltimore's inner-city neighborhoods greeted Mark Farfel nearly a decade ago when, as a young graduate student, he collected thousands of dust samples from rundown rented rowhouses.
He was looking for traces of the toxic metal that was poisoning thousands of young children, most of them poor and black.
Now, as director of lead-poisoning-prevention research for the Kennedy Institute, the lean, intense Farfel is gearing up to return to the city's streets this month.
His mission is to help break the vicious cycle that allows young children to be irreversibly brain-damaged from ingesting lead-paint dust before action is taken to remove the hazard.
With funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Farfel is about to launch a three-year study looking for practical ways of repairing and maintaining older dwellings to reduce the health threat from the lead paint found in perhaps 75 percent of the homes in Baltimore.
"What can be done with houses before children get sick?" he asks.
The answer could help solve a problem that has plagued the nation's cities for decades.
A solution has become even more urgent now because of recent research suggesting that one in six American children under the age of 6 years -- and up to half of all young children in the Baltimore-Washington area -- could suffer learning and behavioral problems from low-level lead exposures far below the official poisoning threshold.
The cost of removing or covering lead paint in homes is a major stumbling block to preventing children from being poisoned, say officials in all levels of government.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates that 57 million homes nationwide contain lead paint. Testing and de-leading only the 3.8 million "priority hazard" homes -- where young children live amid toxic dust or flakes from deteriorating paint -- will cost $8 billion to $10 billion a year for the next 10 years, HUD says.
COST HIGHER HERE
The problem is compounded in Maryland because the average cost of de-leading a home in Baltimore is two or three times higher than the estimate used in HUD's national cost projections.
De-leading about 70 two-story rowhouses under the city's pilot lead-paint abatement program costs about $14,000 a house, according to James McCabe, chief of City Builders Inc., a lead-removal agency of the city's housing department.
The city's landlords contend the pricetag is often higher, and that abatements frequently cost more than the houses are worth. But, even at $10,000 per home, more than $2 billion would be needed to remove all lead paint from the 205,114 dwellings in Baltimore built before 1950, when the paint was used in most housing construction.
Ira C. Cooke, lawyer and lobbyist for the Property Owners Association, a group of the city's larger landlords, says such astronomical cost estimates show the folly of current city and state regulations requiring the removal or encapsulation of all lead paint in a home, even if the paint is not deteriorating.
"There's not enough money to take care of Baltimore City under these regulations, not to mention Hagerstown or Cumberland or La Plata, which have just as much lead paint," he says.
"No one is advocating total lead removal," counters Lawrence Ward, an assistant secretary in the Maryland Department of the Environment.
POISON IN THE AIR
Health officials point out that any lead paint is potentially poisonous because it "chalks" as it ages, giving off toxic dust long before the paint begins to peel. And tenants' advocates say that most homes they visit have obviously deteriorating paint, as well as other problems.
"I've never been in a house with a lead-poisoned child that was in good condition," says Barbara Samuels, a Legal Aid Bureau lawyer.
But even health and tenants' advocates acknowledge that public funds for lead-abatement are scarce, and the per-home cost must be reduced so prevention efforts can be broadened.
That's where Farfel's research comes in.
"HUD and everyone else is looking for a major excuse not to do anything," he says, and the high cost of abatement provides such an excuse.
One answer, Farfel says, is to emphasize prevention rather than a "Cadillac method" of abatement after a child has been poisoned.
Farfel plans to look at whether lead-dust levels can be lowered significantly by a variety of building repair and maintenance activities, ranging from frequent washing of windows, floors and other surfaces to sealing wooden floors with vinyl or polyurethane and replacing windows and other lead-painted woodwork.
He says he will evaluate different approaches ranging in cost from $1,000 or less up to $6,000 per home.
"My guess is we'll see a difference in lead-dust levels because we're building on things we've seen will work," Farfel says. "The question is, can you sustain it? And how much of a reduction will it be?"
He plans to work with City Homes, an Enterprise Foundation subsidiary that is rehabilitating about 170 rundown row-homes.
Some landlords say they already are practicing what Farfel plans to study. Stanley E. Sugarman, who has about 500 rental units, says he spends about $850 repainting, refinishing or tiling floors and making other repairs to his properties between tenants.
LIFESTYLE A CAUSE?
Sugarman and other landlords see a link between lead poisoning and the lifestyles of many within the city's black underclass. The landlords suggest that lack of parental supervision, poor diet and inadequate housekeeping put children at risk.
But health experts dispute this view, saying that poor black children are more likely to suffer lead poisoning because of the condition of housing they live in.
"So much of it is just basic housing maintenance," Farfel says. "If we had more responsible housing maintenance, we'd have less lead poisoning."
Landlords nevertheless contend that Baltimore should put more emphasis on educating parents about such factors as proper diet, washing children's hands and housekeeping. They say Washington, D.C., is a successful example of such an approach, where complete de-leading of houses is not required.
The number of lead poisoning cases in Washington has dropped by more than 50 percent in the past four years, from 793 in 1987 to 294 last year, according to Ella Witherspoon, chief of the District's lead poisoning prevention program.
But such figures may be misleading because Washington has cut back its door-to-door testing of children in poor neighborhoods, where lead poisoning is most likely to occur, says Janet Phoenix, director of health education for the Alliance to End Childhood Lead Poisoning, a Washington-based group of environmentalists, health and housing advocates.
REMOVAL IS PREFERRED
A balanced diet and frequent wet-mopping with phosphate detergents can help reduce children's exposure, health experts say, but such measures are no substitute for removing the lead paint that is the source of toxic dust and flakes.
Some lawyers believe that the growing wave of lawsuits being filed here and elsewhere on behalf of lead-poisoning victims will ultimately force landlords and property owners to remove lead ,, paint.
Moreover, class-action lawsuits have been filed in Boston, New York and Philadelphia seeking to make paint manufacturers pay for removing lead paint from those cities' public housing. The suit filed in Philadelphia last November could affect Baltimore, since the suit seeks damages from the industry on behalf of all major cities in the country.
The class-action suits contend that the industry knew in the 1920s and 1930s that lead paint was causing irreversible brain damage in children who ingested it, yet continued to market lead-based paints without any warning to consumers.
FEDERAL HELP EYED
Many experts look beyond the courtroom for solutions to the lead problem. They say the federal government must help cities and states deal with the huge cost.
President Bush's 1992 budget would increase funding for the screening of children and earmark $25 million for states and cities to spend on lead-paint abatement in privately owned housing, but that is only a fraction of what will be needed.
"Twenty-five million dollars isn't even a fig leaf," says an aide to Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md. "They need to attack it in a much broader scale, if they're really serious about it."
Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin, D-Md., is drafting a bill that would raise $1 billion a year for lead-paint abatement by taxing the continuing production and uses of the metal, mostly for auto batteries. He says he plans to introduce the measure soon.
IS THE WATER SAFE?
As some officials search for money and more effective ways to deal with the lead-paint problem, other officials are focusing their attention on the health threat posed by low-level exposure to other sources of lead, notably drinking water and soil.
Lead in drinking water usually comes from solder that was widely used in indoor copper plumbing before being banned from drinking water systems in 1986. Drinking water is a leading source of low-level lead exposure.
Maryland Environment Secretary Robert Perciasepe last week reminded schools and day-care centers they must comply with the federal Lead Contamination Control Act, which requires them to identify and repair water sources that could add lead to drinking water. Most public school systems have started testing their water and replacing lead-contaminated water fountains with bottled water, but only about one-fourth of the state's 900 private schools and only 5 percent of 1,460 licensed day-care centers have complied so far.
As for soil, Maryland environmental officials are in the third year of a $4.8 million, federally funded study of whether removing peeling lead paint from the outside of homes and replacing lead-laced topsoil in the yards reduces the amount of lead in children's blood. The researchers are working with 125 homes and about 200 children in two neighborhoods in Park Heights and Walbrook.
High lead levels have been found in gardens and topsoil in Baltimore and other cities, probably from auto emissions and paint removal.
"Lead in soil is going to be a big problem," predicts Ellen K. Silbergeld, a University of Maryland toxicologist who heads the governor's advisory council on lead poisoning. "There is no doubt that lead in soil and dust contributes directly to lead in children.
It is too early to say if removing lead from yards will lower children's lead levels, says Merrill Brophy, the research project manager. The cost of abating lead outside has run about $3,700 per house.
As expensive as it is to remove lead paint, officials note that it can be even more costly not to. Patricia McLaine, MDE's lead poisoning prevention coordinator, estimates that Maryland spends $90,000 on special education and medical care for every child who is poisoned. And there is no way of estimating the cost when children are robbed of their intellectual potential and, as adults, perhaps take out their lead-induced rage and frustration on society.
"The cost of doing nothing is pretty terrible," says Bruce Fowler, a toxicologist at the University of Maryland. "This problem can be dealt with, but we have to want to do it."