Reply #8: To reverse this problem, we ALL must Abandon most American cities...

[Up2Late]

...until they are made environmentally safe to live and raise children.

Note: It's not only a city problem, I was poisoned as a child, living in small town Indiana, by living too close to several EPA Super Fund sites.

All if those years we used Leaded Gasoline in this country, has left the lead levels in the soils and environment (where inner-city play and grow up) still have Toxic levels of Lead.

Why is is a problem, read this summery of a report done in May 2005 by Howard W. Mielke, who teaches at the College of Pharmacy at Xavier University of Louisiana, at the link below:

<http://www.agiweb.org/geotimes/may05/feature_leadlegacy.html>

Lead’s Toxic Urban Legacy and Children’s Health

by Howard W. Mielke

In a 1980 report to the National Academy of Sciences, geochemist Clair C. Patterson wrote an astonishing sentence: “Sometime in the near future it probably will be shown that the older urban areas of the United States have been rendered more or less uninhabitable by the millions of tons of poisonous industrial lead residues that have accumulated in cities during the past century.”

That grim prediction is proving true, with lead poisoning now endemic in inner-city areas of major U.S. cities. In inner-city New Orleans, for example, a quarter of all children are excessively exposed to lead, according to recent studies....


Fourteen percent of all children in New Orleans and 25 percent of children in its inner-city areas are exposed to potentially dangerous levels of lead in the soil. The children either directly inhale the lead particles or are exposed from hand-to-mouth contact in play areas. Projects in New Orleans and elsewhere are trying to reduce and eliminate this risk. All images courtesy of Howard Mielke.

Also, make sure you check out this side bar article from the same article too:

Lead linked to violence

For several decades, the medical and scientific community has accepted that elevated levels of lead in blood can cause adverse health and developmental issues in children, such as anemia, hearing problems, lowered intelligence and slowed growth. Research over the past few years, however, has revealed another problem associated with lead: The soft metal may be one of the most significant causes of violent criminal behavior in young people.

In a 1996 study of 301 first- and second-grade children in Pittsburgh, Pa., Dr. Herbert Needleman, a pediatrician and expert on lead poisoning, found that those with the highest concentrations of lead in their bones showed more aggressive behavior, attention disorders and delinquency.

In another study in 2002, Needleman and colleagues followed the theory that elevated lead levels in children’s bones could indicate future criminal behavior by studying a control group of 194 arrested and adjudicated youths, aged 12 to 18, and 146 nondelinquent youths. The researchers found that the troubled teens had significantly higher bone-lead levels than nondelinquent teens. Besides the behavioral issues, none of these youths showed any symptoms of lead poisoning, Needleman says.

Extrapolating the data from these studies, between 18 to 38 percent of all delinquency in Allegheny County, Pa. (which includes Pittsburgh), could be due to lead, Needleman said at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington, D.C., in February. The results are “striking,” he says.

(more at link below)
<http://www.agiweb.org/geotimes/may05/feature_leadlegacy.html#sidebar1>