This space provides an overview of The Lead (Pb) Monitoring Project, an effort being led by @read_holman but hopefully with the help of many others (including you?).

Background

Lead is a silent, persistent environmental toxin. It can’t be seen, smelled, or tasted. Yet studies show that it is inherently unsafe at any exposure, with even miniscule amounts causing irreversible health impacts, especially in the neurological development of children.

Despite the substantial news coverage of Flint, and compared to other public health campaigns (e.g. mercury in fish), most Americans remain largely unaware of the large amounts of lead in urban environments. And because it is expensive to both test for the presence of lead and remediate issues when they are found, there has been little proactive action by public officials and continued public surprise about lead exposure when testing is done.

While lead as a public health issue has decreased significantly over the last 30 years, widespread use in the prior decades made lead ubiquitous in our lives. It’s still present in paint on older homes, soil where industrial and emission pollutants have settled, dust created by paint and soil particles, and drinking water that has traveled through city or home pipes made of lead.

A key challenge with lowering lead exposure is that communities typically don’t know that they’ve been exposed to lead until it’s too late. Communities and public health experts have difficulty advocating for change because of a root problem: we actually don’t know much about the problem. There just isn’t sufficient data on lead exposure within communities to communicate the problem in order to drive action, at least until it becomes an emergency.

Meanwhile the presence of lead is being detected, particularly within drinking water, at an increasingly alarming rate. A recent GAO report found that nearly half of schools surveyed across the country hadn’t tested for lead in their drinking water within the past 12 months. But of those that did, more than a third found elevated levels.

Many cities have independently been finding significant amounts of lead in their drinking water. An effort within the city of Chicago found that, of nearly 3,000 water samples taken, 70% had lead of some amount and 30% had lead amounts exceeding the EPA maximum allowed for bottled water. Other cities experiencing lead in water issues include Pittsburgh, New Orleans, San Diego, and Nashville. Indeed at the height of this issue occurring in Flint, a reuters report found nearly 3,000 communities with lead poisoning levels higher than those in Flint.

Initiative Details

Over the course of 6 to 9 months (starting October 2018), this project aims to:

-- Engage citizens, neighborhood groups, and community scientists to understand the landscape of lead-related conversations and activities already active across the country.

-- Determine where and how Public Lab can best play into this ecosystem, perhaps through education, trainings, or convening local workshops and facilitating conversations;

-- Explore the development of a "lead testing kit" to better equip these groups;

-- Identify various models for testing of lead in homes, parks, and neighborhoods; and

-- Pilot these efforts within up to five (5) cities across the country.

If these pilots are found to be successful, we would expand to other communities, further equipping and empowering citizens, community scientists, and neighborhood organizations to test their environment while helping them share their data and connect their efforts to their local public health and health care institutions in order to propel efforts to remediate problems found.

What is clever/original about this idea?

Formal top-down efforts and general market and political forces have shown themselves insufficient at addressing this underlying issue. Developing a community of citizen scientists, equipping them with new technologies, and better integrating them with public health institutions has the potential to activate much greater awareness and action.

One driver of the current system is the (expensive) state of technology: EPA standards require the use of ICP-MS which, due to its cost and complexity, is only available through professional testing labs and universities. Meanwhile, a number of prototypes for a cheap, reusable testing kit have been developed, including a kit built by an 11-year old through a national science competition.

How can I be involved?

Glad you asked! We're in the initial stages of this effort, which has been focused on just identifying who is doing what (and who is interested in doing what).

Already working in this space? Want to work in this space? Have pointers for people that work or want to work in this space? Amazing.

Reach out to @read_holman on this website, send him an email at read@publiclab.org, or simply post a comment or question below.

Community questions and notes on the topic of lead aggregated at https://publiclab.org/wiki/lead