Dangers of Lead Poisoning

Your March 8 story “Officials Discount Lead-Poisoning Statistics” may have left your readers falsely reassured.

It was a direct response to an earlier one which indicated that as many as 27.3% of Ventura County’s children may have unacceptably high levels of lead in their blood caused primarily by exposure to lead-based paint. Local officials discounted the survey saying that “lead exposure to children cannot be that high” because “many of the houses in the county were built after lead-based paint was banned by the state.”

In fact, lead-based paint was not banned until 1977, a mere 13 years ago. A recent drive-through tour of Ventura and Oxnard revealed that there are hundreds and hundreds of homes built prior to this time. One can reasonably assume that many of these are the residences of children ages 6 months to 5 years, the age group most affected by lead poisoning.

Because the survey was based on a national random sample of metropolitan areas, Lawrence Dodds, Ventura County’s director of Public Health Services, felt the statistics were probably lower than indicated because he questioned whether “you could extrapolate from cities like Oakland and Philadelphia to Ventura” because our houses are much newer. He further stated that he “would expect a low likelihood of those levels being accurate.”

I would like to counter by saying that a survey which admits it did not include Asians and Hispanics increases the probability of error in the other direction. The percentage is probably higher, not lower, when one takes into account such a blatant omission. Isn’t it common knowledge that in most of our school districts fully 50% of the students fall into these two omitted groups?

What we all need to do is simply admit that lead poisoning definitely does occur among the children of Ventura County. Even if only 100 children are affected, we, their families and the schools they will one day attend have a significant problem.

The effects of lead poisoning include memory impairment, behavior problems, lower intelligence quotients and in the most severe cases mental retardation. All are irreversible.

It doesn’t do any of us any good to dismiss lead poisoning as a “relatively insignificant problem” as did a spokesman for a building trades association. All children deserve the opportunity to thrive and function at maximum potential. Those who become even minimally damaged place yet another stress on an already overburdened public schools system.

DIANNE JOHNSON SELBREDE

Camarillo

Selbrede is public relations coordinator for the Assn. for Retarded Citizens Ventura County.