Before Flint, The EPA Backed A Study Exposing Kids To Lead

Michael Bastasch

The water crisis in Flint, Mich. isn’t the first time the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has come under fire for allowing children in an economically-depressed area be exposed to high levels of toxic lead.

The agency backed a controversial study in the 1990s that intentionally exposed young children in Baltimore to lead. The study eventually found its way to court where judges cited the Nuremberg Code and compared the experiment to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

In 1993, the EPA and Maryland’s housing department awarded the Kennedy Krieger Institute (KKI) $200,000 to study the effects of lead dust and paint on children’s development in poor, predominantly black neighborhoods in Baltimore. Specifically, researchers wanted to study the effectiveness of lead abatement strategies. KKI is affiliated with Johns Hopkins University.

KKI researchers wrote that “lead poisoning in children is a problem in Baltimore City and other communities across the country,” adding that lead “in paint, house dust and outside soil are major sources of lead exposure for children.”

The point of the study was to see if lead abatement strategies could be done in a cost-effective way, but to find this out, researchers specifically requested “small children be present in the houses.” Researchers even encouraged landlords participating in the study to rent to tenants with young kids.

KKI would compare lead levels in blood samples taken from children at regular intervals to see how effective abatements efforts were, but it turned out the experiment ruffled more than a few feathers.

Families involved in the study ended up suing KKI over the study, arguing they were not properly warned that their kids would be part of an experiment designed to expose them to high levels of lead. In 2001, judges with the Maryland Court of Appeals were appalled by researchers’ conduct.

“The research project at issue here… presents similar problems as those in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study conducted from 1932 until 197,” judges wrote in their majority opinion. In the Tuskegee experiments “patients infected with syphilis were not subsequently informed of the availability of penicillin for treatment of the illness, in order for the scientists and researchers to be able to continue research on the effects of the illness.”

Judges also cited the Nuremberg Code in their opinion. The Nuremberg Code was a set of research ethics agreed to after World War II when Nazi scientists had committed heinous act against Jewish prisoners, supposedly in the name of science.

“The study, by its design, placed and/or retained children in areas where they might come into contact with elevated levels of lead dust,” judges wrote. “Clearly, KKI contemplated that at least some of the children would develop elevated blood lead levels while participating in the study.”

“One simply does not expose otherwise healthy children, incapable of personal assent (consent), to a nontherapeutic research environment that is known at the inception of the research, might cause the children to ingest lead dust,” judges continued.

About a decade later, KKI was hit with a class action lawsuit for the EPA-backed experiment. What’s even more surprising is KKI stood by its earlier research that exposed kids to lead.

“From 1993 to 1995, Kennedy Krieger conducted federally funded research that showed landlords and building owners could make specific improvements to their properties that would reduce lead within homes,” Dr. Gary Goldstein, KKI’s president, said in a 2011 statement.

“We are proud that the resulting ‘lead safe’ housing standard was made into Maryland law, leading to the end of the epidemic. Today, this law protects families by requiring landlords to make their houses ‘lead safe,’” Goldstein said.

But the 2011 lawsuit alleges “children’s health was put at risk in order to develop low-cost abatement measures that would help all children, the landlords, and the general public as well.”

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