Lead-Paint Poison Case Goes to Trial : Illness Suffered by Child in El Monte Apartment Is a Distressingly Familiar Story to Health Officials

When they took their 1-year-old daughter to a pediatrician two years ago, Jorge and Josefina Morales of El Monte were simply seeking to have her runny nose and chest congestion checked. They were not expecting that a test recently mandated by the state would show the baby also had dangerously high levels of lead in her blood.

The test, administered in August, 1992, prompted a routine investigation by county health officials. The finding: The baby had been poisoned by lead paint flaking from the windowsills and bathroom door of the family’s two-room apartment.

The Moraleses sued their landlord. Today, trial in their Pomona Superior Court case is scheduled to begin, setting a precedent of sorts. While other lead-paint poisoning suits have resulted in out-of-court settlements, theirs is the first in California to go to trial, experts say.

While the case may stand out in legal terms, the Moraleses’ story is a distressingly familiar one to Los Angeles County health officials.

Ever since testing of children from low-income families became mandatory three years ago, the number of reported lead poisonings in the county has jumped from a couple of cases a year in the mid-1980s to 529 last year.

County officials this year hired 65 additional health department employees to take on the burgeoning caseload and a backlog of 800 other cases.

Although the federal government had previously recommended blood-lead testing for children of low-income families, California did not adopt such a policy until it was sued by a variety of civil rights organizations in 1990.

Even then, the county budget for lead cases remained stagnant--only enough to pay for one investigator to handle the lead poisoning cases part-time--while reported cases were climbing to 271 in 1992 from 44 in 1990.

Only after County Supervisor Gloria Molina made lead poisoning an issue in 1992 did the county begin applying for millions of dollars in federal grant money and state money from special fees assessed against the paint industry and other lead-emission producers.

Now the county has 75 employees to handle lead poisoning, including nurses who examine children with lead levels higher than 15 micrograms per deciliter of blood, environmental investigators who track down the source of lead poisoning and educational workers who provide prevention information.

The changes illustrate how California has belatedly overcome the false notion that the West Coast, with its relatively young housing stock, was free of lead-based paint, said Ellen Widess, an attorney with Lead Safe California, a nonprofit environmental advisory agency created earlier this year.

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Federal health officials estimate that more than 580,000 California children under age 6, or one in five, live in pre-1950 housing likely to contain paint with heavy concentrations of lead. Only 10% of California’s low-income children--the ones most at risk for lead paint poisoning because they are more likely to live in older and substandard housing--have been tested so far, Widess said.

Although paint manufacturers in Europe stopped making lead-based paint in the 1920s, the U.S. paint industry did not lower its high lead concentrations until 1950. The U.S. government banned lead paint altogether in 1978.

In Los Angeles County, building owners can be cited by the county and required to reduce lead concentrations by repairing their buildings. Failure can result in civil prosecution with fines of up to $2,500 a day, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Lisa Kaas of the district attorney’s consumer protection division.

In the past, the division has filed lawsuits against auto body shops and battery manufacturers for releasing hazardous lead emissions into the air, Kaas said. Lead paint violations are a new ground for prosecution, with five landlords currently under investigation for possible legal action, she said.

Lead contamination can present landlords with an unexpected and overwhelming problem. Completely removing lead-based paint can cost tens of thousands of dollars per housing unit, according to Widess of Lead Safe California. Simple dry scraping of lead-based paint can release dangerous dust into the air, creating a worse hazard, comparable to asbestos removal. And the estimated number of houses with lead-based paint--2.2 million in California--would overwhelm the few removal companies with the specialized skills and equipment to do the job safely, she said.

So Lead Safe is trying to devise containment measures such as coatings to encapsulate the chipping paint, special vacuums, wet mopping and removal and replacement of portions of buildings, such as lead-painted doors and sills.

More than half of the cases of lead poisoning in California are from Los Angeles County, state statistics show. And the Los Angeles-Long Beach area ranks among the top three metropolitan areas nationwide in the number of children at risk, Widess said.

“The myth was that kids had to eat paint chips, but it’s in microscopic bits of lead flaking from houses that are not kept up and dust that seeps into the soil,” she said. Jorge Morales, a 40-year-old battery plant worker, and his wife, 35, did not realize lead paint was a health problem when they moved into their Elliot Avenue apartment in 1987 with their two children, ages 6 and 7, said their attorney, Mark Ravis.

The couple complained to their landlords, Patrick and Rita Quan, about the peeling and chipped brown paint flaking from around the window sills and door frame because it looked ugly, Ravis said.

But their complaints went unanswered, they said. The Quans promised repair work but did none, Jorge Morales said.

The Quans’ attorney did not return phone calls seeking comment.

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On May 8, 1991, the Moraleses’ third daughter was born, a lively baby who sat with the family at the kitchen table under the flaking and peeling window sill. Because California did not require lead screening for children of low-income families until late that year, the baby’s blood was not tested for lead until she came down with an unrelated flu-like illness nearly a year later, and was tested by a doctor covered under her father’s medical insurance plan.

After the county investigated, the Quans were cited. They replaced the window sill and door frame, but the child’s blood lead levels remained high. Another visit by a county investigator revealed lead paint flaking from the bathroom door and frame. The Morales family moved out for a month in 1992 while the Quans made repairs.

There is still debate over what level of lead exposure is harmful to children.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention consider unsafe any level higher than 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood--a ratio similar to an eyedropper of liquid in a gallon bucket. The Morales baby’s blood-lead level was 34 micrograms per deciliter. Children younger than 6 can be without symptoms at the 10-microgram level, yet still suffer mental retardation, learning disabilities, impaired growth, hearing loss, limited attention span and behavior problems, according to the federal agency.

No treatment exists. Decreased exposure and a good diet help eliminate the lead from the child’s body over time, experts said. Extreme exposures of 45 micrograms per deciliter of blood can require intervention with drugs, called chelation therapy.

The Moraleses decided to sue their landlords after they discovered that their daughter might have been permanently harmed by her exposure. Her lead blood level is now 20 micrograms per deciliter, still above the federal standards.

Although the 3-year-old girl is still too young for IQ testing, medical experts will testify in the trial that her IQ could be decreased by 15 points as a result of the exposure, attorney Ravis said.

Josefina Morales said her daughter seems to be lagging behind developmentally and is a pensive child. Talking has come more slowly for her than for her two older siblings, now 13 and 14. The family remains in the 18-unit apartment complex where peeling wooden doors and sills in other units were recently replaced with unpainted wooden doors and aluminum sills.

“Now, it’s clean here,” Josefina Morales said. “But if I would have known what was in the paint, we would have left before.”

Lead Poisoning The number of lead-poisoning cases reported in Los Angeles County rose sharply after screenings of low-income children were required in November, 1991, and the minimum reportable level was lowered.

Year Number of Cases * 1994 441 * 1993 529 * 1992 271 * 1991 131 * 1990 44 * 1989 18 * 1988 18 * 1987 9 * 1986 1 * 1985 9 * 1984 2

* 1994 to date

Source: L.A. County Dept. of Health Services, Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program