WASHINGTON -- 'I think there is a failure to screen huge numbers of the children who are most likely' to suffer from lead poisoning.
U.S. Jack Reed
The national drive to eliminate childhood lead poisoning "has stalled" under the Bush administration "and may in fact be moving in the opposite direction," U.S. Sen. Jack Reed charged yesterday.
But Reed backed off his criticism somewhat after a panel of government witnesses -- including specialists and Bush political appointees -- described continuing efforts to test children for lead poisoning, to remove lead paint and its byproducts from homes, and to prosecute landlords who thwart lead cleanups.
Reed acknowledged that the hearing turned up no evidence that the Bush administration has done anything to slow or halt the campaign against lead poisoning.
Nor did Reed dispute the assessment of one witness, Dr. Dick Jackson of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that the fight against lead poisoning is "probably the environmental health success story of the past half-century."
Still, Reed said after leading a Senate hearing on the topic, "I think there is a failure to screen huge numbers of the children who are most likely" to suffer from lead poisoning.
Reed criticized the administration for failing, in his view, to ask Congress for extra money and the law-enforcement tools it needs to achieve a long-standing goal of eliminating lead poisoning in the United States by 2010.
Reed also criticized the Bush administration for considering requests to transform certain mandatory federal anti-lead guidelines into voluntary ones. Jackson, a 25-year veteran of the effort, said such actions as the federal bans on leaded gasoline and the use of lead paint in homes, led to average American lead poisoning levels "lower than was [once] thought feasible on the face of the earth."
Jackson noted, however, that those early, dramatic advances of the 1970s-era anti-lead initiatives have long since given way to the more intractable problem of reducing the threat to "the most difficult children to reach" -- those who live "in the poorest houses in the poorest neighborhoods" in the nation.
Because of the successes in lead removal in public housing, witnesses explained, today's largest lead-poisoning problem by far is among residents of privately owned, low-rent housing whose owners get no federal subsidies.
Witness David Jacobs, a lead-control official with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, cited estimates that safe control and "management" of the lead problem in such old, private, low-income housing would cost $230 million per year for 10 years to accomplish -- though the money does not necessarily have to come from the federal government.
Jacobs said it would cost an estimated $2.1 billion per year for 10 years to completely remove the lead hazard from such housing.
President Bush has requested $126 million for the lead-abatement program in 2003 -- up from $110 million this year, in a program that has roughly doubled its spending level over the past few years, Jacobs said.
"I asked them to request $200 million," Reed said of the administration. "They went up, but they didn't go up enough."
