The Baltimore Lead Paint Study was a controversial clinical study conducted by the Johns Hopkins Kennedy Krieger Institute (KKI) in poor Baltimorean neighborhoods during the 1990s. Families with young children were deliberately exposed to lead by being housed with their families in apartments where lead paint had not been completely removed. Researchers hoped to show that less stringent lead abatement techniques that would cost landlords less money would pose minimal health risks to children. The study was criticised for targeting poor African American children, for exposing children to a known health risk and for inadequate participant consent. The backlash culminated in class action lawsuits against KKI by Ericka Grimes and Myron Higgins, two of the subjects representing on the order of a hundred affected children without adequate care.
Background
Despite knowledge of lead's toxicity, there is a long history of using lead in paint due to its role in maintaining a paint's color and increasing durability. In 1951, Baltimore was the first city to ban the use of lead paint in new housing, starting a move towards abating the amount of lead use in homes. Twenty-seven years later, in 1978 the Consumer Product Safety Commission laid down a nationwide ban of lead-based paint for residential use in the United States.
The Kennedy Krieger Institute is a branch of Johns Hopkins that provides medical care, rehabilitation, and research, especially emphasizing research geared towards children with learning and physical disabilities arising from neurodegenerative disorders. Lead's effects on the nervous system manifests into reduced cognitive ability, especially in children. Once lead paint was made illegal, many properties that were painted with lead still remained, especially in Baltimore, eventually leaving the painted walls that were not properly remodeled to decay and thus allow lead to be released as chips or dust, increasing risk of ingestion for future renovators and inhabitants. Thus it became of interest to study how residential properties with lead could be removed, and inevitably how to abate lead without incurring high expenses for removal.
The study was funded by the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Study description
To investigate how well various techniques in abating lead content reduced the prevalence of lead poisoning in low income neighborhoods, KKI sought to treat properties with these different methods and observe how much lead accumulated in young children when living in these properties. In total, several housing properties were categorized into five levels of abatement. Starting in 1993, KKI helped landlords abate apartments partially or with less expensive techniques graded by these levels. In total, 107 properties were categorized into five groups by degree of repair made to the property. KKI also actively found new families to live in these apartments, bringing the total number of children evaluated to 140, and even offered incentives for doing so. To quantify the effectiveness of each level of abatement, the researchers measured lead content of homes and took periodic blood tests over a two-year period. If the repairs were effective, the lead concentration in properties with higher degrees of abatement or built without lead would be less than properties with less repair and the lead content in young children would not increase as much or at all. Follow up measurements were to be made every couple of years after to track how the lead concentration changed in children.