© Dutch Boy PaintsA coloring book from the 1920s promoting lead paint
Roughly 9,000 children under the age of six were exposed to high levels of lead in their drinking water in Flint, Michigan, between April 2014 and October 2015. Thanks to a series of government failures, some of their lives will be forever changed by diminished IQ, damaged hearing, learning disabilities, and possibly increased criminality—the hallmarks of lead poisoning.
Sadly, those kids are not alone. Over the past century, tens of millions of children have been poisoned by lead, mainly by its presence in old household paint. And many more will be, thanks to the hundreds of tons of lead paint that remains on the walls of houses, apartment buildings, and workplaces across the United States, decades after a federal ban. Many of the most vulnerable are children living in poor neighborhoods of color.
Flint's tragedy is shedding light on a health issue that's been lurking in U.S. households for what seems like forever. But that demands the question: Why has lead poisoning never really been treated like what it is—the longest-lasting childhood-health epidemic in U.S. history?
According to a new paper in the Journal of Urban History by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, the public-health historians and co-authors of The Politics of Science and the Fate of America's Children, the answer lies at the intersection of politics, class, and race.
Comment: Crumbling infrastructure and disregard for the poor: Lead poisoning prevalent in poverty-stricken US states