from the won’t-somebody-poison-the-children!?! dept
With all the conversations we’ve had in the past few months about the decline of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the leadership, or lack thereof, of RFK Jr. and Donald Trump, you might have been left with the impression that everything at HHS is broken beyond repair. But that’s not entirely true. Despite the rash of budget, staff, and grant cuts that have kneecapped HHS, you can still get a great deal of information from the HHS website, for instance. As an example, here is the CDC site’s page providing information about lead poisoning in the country. It describes how the agency began measuring blood lead levels (BLLs) nationally in 1995 to find where elevated BLLs exist, especially in children, in order to deploy federal resources to combat its occurrence. The CDC page has this to say about BLLs generally in terms of their impact on children.
There is no known safe BLL. Exposure to lead can seriously harm a child’s health. Millions of children are being exposed to lead in their homes, increasing their risks for:
- Damage to the brain and nervous system
- Slowed growth and development
- Learning and behavior problems (e.g., reduced IQ, ADHD, juvenile delinquency, and criminal behavior)
- Hearing and speech problems
Well, I’m no doctor, but gosh golly gee, that seems bad! Like, the kind of thing a federal government that has protecting its own population as a supposed chief aim would want to combat. And, in touting its own progress on that same page, the CDC agreed at the time the page was written in 2024.
The decrease is most likely a result of an intense coordinated effort to control or eliminate lead sources in children’s environments by:
- Government officials
- Healthcare and social service providers
- The communities most at risk
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is a child agency of HHS, has its own page on the topic as well. There they talk again about how this was historically a much larger problem, but one that still remains and needs to be addressed through a coordinated and likely federal effort.
Researchers estimate that half of the U.S. population, more than 170 million people, were exposed to harmful lead levels in early childhood. “The scope of such widespread exposure, particularly from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, suggests the legacy of lead continues to shape the health and wellbeing of the country in ways we do not yet fully understand,” according to the researchers. Lead exposure is associated with IQ loss, for which even small deficits can have a meaningful adverse effect on people’s lives and on society.
The Biden-Harris Administration actively works to protect communities from lead exposure. More than 9 million homes, schools, daycares, and businesses receive their drinking water through a lead pipe, putting people at risk of lead exposure. A whole-of-government effort is deploying resources across federal, state and local governments to address lead hazards. Read more in this May 2024 brief: $3 Billion to Replace Toxic Lead Pipes and Deliver Clean Drinking Water to Communities Across the Country.
There’s not a lot of ambiguity in any of this. Lead poisoning and any level of BLLs, particularly in children, are problems worthy of combatting. To say that we don’t want lead in the blood of our children ought to be as uncontroversial a position as one can take. And, yet, it appears that one of the victims of HHS’ budget slashing is the very program designed to help local communities, particularly those in poorer areas.
On April 1, the staff of the CDC’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program was terminated as part of the agency’s reduction in force, according to NPR. The staff included epidemiologists, statisticians, and advisors who specialized in lead exposures and responses.
The cuts were immediately consequential to health officials in Milwaukee, who are currently dealing with a lead exposure crisis in public schools. Six schools have had to close, displacing 1,800 students. In April, the city requested help from the CDC’s lead experts, but the request was denied—there was no one left to help.
That Milwaukee example is an interesting one, as it offers us yet another opportunity to watch RFK Jr. simply obfuscate and/or lie in response to it. In a hearing, members of Congress asked RFK Jr. directly about the Milwaukee issue. Kennedy assured those lawmakers that he had a crackerjack team from HHS on the ground in the city working on this. Turns out, not so much.
Milwaukee Health Commissioner Mike Totoraitis told NPR that this is false. “There is no team in Milwaukee,” he said. “We had a single [federal] staff person come to Milwaukee for a brief period to help validate a machine, but that was separate from the formal request that we had for a small team to actually come to Milwaukee for our Milwaukee Public Schools investigation and ongoing support there.”
Kennedy has also previously told lawmakers that lead experts at the CDC who were terminated would be rehired. But that statement was also false. The health department’s own communications team told ABC that the lead experts would not be reinstated.
Look, I realize that we’re in a brave new world in which Trump officials can just do whatever they want, say whatever they want, and that they all have an expectation that they are untouchable. But at some point, there have to be consequences for a Cabinet member sitting before Congress and lying through his teeth. Hearings. Inquiries. Charges for contempt of Congress, or for lying under oath. Something. Anything.
Children are suffering and will suffer even worse because of this nonsense, all while Kennedy plays “pin the tail on my own bullshit” with lawmakers. This simply cannot go on.
Filed Under: bll, blood lead levels, cdc, health and human services, hhs, lead, lead exposure, lead poisoning, maha, nih, rfk jr.
