Childhood lead poisoning in New Hampshire is a major preventable public health crisis that is not often talked about.
While the New Hampshire Public Health Association is concerned about the problem, we also know that we are fortunate that there is now a comprehensive bipartisan bill, Senate Bill 247, sponsored by Sens. Dan Feltes, Jeb Bradley and Sharon Carson, among others, that tackles childhood lead poisoning from both paint and water.
It focuses on prevention. It modernizes and lowers the action level of lead to what Republican governors in Maine and New Jersey have done. It puts in place testing of children to catch poisonings early, and it requires health insurance companies to cover the cost of testing. It also makes sure we test for lead in drinking water in our multifamily housing, our day care centers and our schools, and take steps to address any harmful levels.
Finally, it makes the first state commitment of money to remediate and address lead.
Chipping paint and dust from remodeling on homes constructed prior to 1978 contain lead, which if ingested can cause poisoning to a child’s brain and central nervous system. This damage is irreversible and can result in brain development problems that reduce intelligence and cause behavioral changes such as reduced attention span, increased antisocial behavior and reduced educational attainment.
The cost to a family of having a child grow up who will never reach their full potential and will have lifelong intellectual and behavioral issues is devastating, particularly when they know that lead poisoning is largely preventable.
But it is not only the families that suffer; all of us who live in New Hampshire bear the cost of this public health crisis.
The cost of addressing the special needs for this child both educationally, medically and socially is expensive. We cannot afford to keep losing generations of Granite State children to a disease that we can do something about.
Each year in New Hampshire, several hundred new cases emerge of Granite State children getting poisoned with lead when living or receiving child care in housing built before 1978. In fact, where New Hampshire kids live, play and receive childcare is the most powerful predictor of the future of a child’s health when it comes to lead poisoning.
New Hampshire has the oldest housing stock of anywhere in the United States, with 62 percent of its homes built before lead-based paint was banned in 1978. Even if a child does not live in a pre-1978 home, they may be receiving child care in a facility or home that was built before 1978 and thereby may possibly be exposed to lead from that facility.
For this reason, the major public health prevention strategy available to reduce lead poisoning in children is to allow for pre-1978 structures to be maintained in a manner that keeps them safe from lead exposure. While there is a cost to do this, the cost of not doing it is even greater.
In a national study published in Environmental Health Perspectives titled “Childhood Lead Poisoning: Conservative Estimates of the Social and Economic Benefits of Lead Hazard Control,” the author indicates that the cost of lead paint hazard control is $1 billion to $11 billion and the benefits of reduction are health care ($11 billion to $53 billion), lifetime earnings ($165 billion to $233 billion), tax revenue ($25 billion to $35 billion), special education ($30 million to $146 million), attention deficit–hyperactivity disorder ($267 million) and the direct costs of crime ($1.7 billion). The result is $17 to $221 of net savings for every dollar invested or a net benefit of $181 billion to $269 billion nationally.
As indicated, with every dollar spent on lead remediation, there is a return of $17 to $221 down the road in cost savings to New Hampshire. This is not just a smart investment in public health, but it makes good fiscal sense.
Now is the time for the Legislature to act on preventing childhood lead poisoning, and let’s stop losing our kids and our money to this crisis.
We urge the Legislature to pass Senate Bill 247 so that New Hampshire can finally see a day when a building’s lead hazards are identified and removed before a child contracts lead poisoning and we can finally stop using our children’s elevated lead blood levels to determine whether there are lead hazards in their homes and child care centers.
(Katie Robert is board president of the New Hampshire Public Health Association.)