Fort Wayne Lead Poisoning coverage by Dan Stockman and Dr. Deborah McMahan and the Fort Wayne-Allen County Health Department

Dan Stockman writes for the Journal-Gazettes and does fanastic investigative reporting. Than Stockman writes this article after I blogged about the inadequate job that Fort Wayne-Allen County Health Department does in eliminating lead poisoning. Stockman recently did a story on the findings of HUD on an agency that has long failed the poor, but is now under the leadership of an African-American male, Maynard Scales. Hud found that that the housing choice program was not being properly managed.

I suggested that the Fort Wayne-Allen County Health Department lead by Dr. Deborah McMahan should suffer the same scrutiny that has received HUD funding. Stockman article blamed the parents of the children, as the under use of Medicaid:

“We’ll pay for it, but we can’t force people to get lead testing,” said Mitch Roob, secretary of Indiana’s Family and Social Services Administration. Medicaid is a federal program administered by the states; in Indiana it is run by FSSA. “Parents are responsible for their child’s health care. We’re not going to pluck a child from their house and prick their finger if their parent doesn’t want us to.”

In essence, if poor single mothers, meaning African-American woman having children on welfare would be more responsible there would not be a lead poisoning problem in the City. But, one interested in eradicating the problem would deep a little deeper to findit interesting that the majority of these mothers lives in the 6th district of the City of Fort Wayne. An area ripe with racial discrimination, redlining and programming that direct funding into property owners with property in that area. But I digress.

Stockman interviews Dr. Charles Coats, and it is not a coincidence that Dr. Coats was selected because Coats office is located in the 6th District!!! Once again, is the only folks responsible for the well-being of poor people falls on African-Americans, while undeserving raced white folks in high position are given a free pass? Dr. Coats is a committed African-American male who came back to his community to serve an underserved population. Sorry, I had to go there.

First, education will prevent lead poisoning among poor children. One of the leading causes of lead poisoning is from contaminated soil, dirt. Dirt according to Environmental Health Perspective online report entitled ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PERSPECTIVES: US Children's Lead Exposures, 2008Implications for Prevention:

"Deteriorating lead paint and contaminated dust and soil are the primary, but not the only, causes of EBLs among U.S. children. Lead is used in thousands of applications, all of which constitute potential exposure sources (U.S. EPA 2006a). Recent data indicate that as many as 30% of children with EBLs do not have an immediate lead paint hazard. For example, in 2004 in Arizona, soil was the most common proximate exposure source, accounting for about 13% of pediatric EBL cases, followed by paint (9%), folk remedies and pottery (9%), dust (8%) and miscellaneous other sources (10%). In 5% of cases no lead source was identified (Arizona Department of Health Services 2005)."

So this put the issue as a community problem not a parent problem.

But Stockman was a little nice on his coverage of the Fort Wayne- Allen County Health Department lead by raced white folks much nicer than the coverage of the Fort Wayne Housing Authority lead by African-Americans. Stockman did interview the executive director of the Fort Wayne Housing Authority but we did not get a quote from the director of the Fort Wayne-Allen County Health Department Dr. Deborah McMahan. You would think Stockman media coverage had a little Hillary-Obama bias to it, you think?

Once again I digress, but you do remember reading about the GPS that was placed in employees cars who worked for the Fort Wayne-Allen County Health Department thattargeted some non-raced white folks. And the staff's interview process that eliminated African-American females because they wore loud print church dresses to interviews at the Fort Wayne-Allen County Health Department.

But back to the lead poisoning article by Stockman.

Lead poisoning comes from a child environment and its not just from children born to medicaid receiptents. And one source in the environment is soil. If soil is contaminated it is possible the air could contain lead poisoning along with the child's drinking water. I say this to say, even if the child does go to the doctor, the area in which that child return will not necessarily be lead free. So let's look at the 6th district environment, gas stations, factories, buried underground tanks, abandoned waste disposal land and could include their schools..wow. Matter of facts ISTEP reports of African-American children coming from some of the schools in the 6th district are extremely low. A child environment, including the home, could be the potential cause for lead poisoning and not simply the inaction of single African-American mother with children on medicaid not going to the doctor.

"Sigh"

But it could be the area where these folks are steered to live based on their race and income in the final analysis. And it is called environmental racism. But talking the "R word" impact to raced white folks is a no-no in the media.


"

Environmental racism refers to the placement of health-threatening structures such as landfills and factories in areas where the poor and ethnic minorities live. These issues are often ignored by the mainstream environmental movement, which is largely White, male, and middle class. In advocating against discriminatory polluting practices, the environmental justice movement particularly emphasizes the issues of community, identity, and race. This article examines how the coverage of environmental justice in three African American newspapers (The Los Angeles Sentinel, The Chicago Defender, and Detroit’s Michigan Chronicle) articulates these three issues in politically problematic ways that are likewise present in the mainstream media."

You just can't call out raced white folks on their racialist behavior, but I can. Especially those who have AFrican-Americans as their friends but are simply mascots to silence criticism on their do nothing attitude to issues impacting the African-American community. !!! More from the experts in the report:

"

Race and Ethnicity
The NHANES show an association between BLLs and race/ethnicity (Figure 3). In 1976-1980 the geometric mean BLL for all U.S. children was 16 μg/dL versus 21 μg/dL for black children (Mahaffey et al. 1982). Data from 1999–2002 show similar patterns: 46.8% of non-Hispanic black children and 27.9% of Mexican-American children exceeded 5 μg/dL compared to 18.7% for white children (CDC 2005b).Fortunately, the gap is narrowing. The most recent national data show that non-Hispanic black children
had the largest decline in BLLs (72%) of all racial and ethnic groups, reducing the differences between subpopulations (R. Jones, personal communication)."

Give me a break, it is what it is. The 6th district contains the largest percentage of African-American and Latinos in the City of Fort Wayne according to the Census Bureau.

If the Fort Wayne-Allen County Health Department is aware that a single area is highly contaminated an is impacting children with lead poisoning would not one declare that there is an epidemic in that community? Is that not what happened with the Love Canal? But this is The Fort Wayne Allen County Health Department has the data concerning the 6th district but Stockman article suggest that medicaid is underused by the parents is the reason for lead poisoning. That is not what the May 18, 2008 report by the Environmental Health Perspective suggest:

"Creating lead safe communities can only occur with the active involvement of all levels of government: local, state and federal, and will depend on several strategies. Foremost are systems that monitor and evaluate all children’s potential lead exposures. Other keys to institutionalizing primary prevention are
requirements for lead-safe housing and work practices, dust- and soil-lead testing following repairs in older housing, identification of all lead sources for children with EBLs, elimination of products with dangerous lead levels, and timely mechanisms to share information about lead sources, including ‘toxic
properties’, across government agencies.

State and local officials should evaluate whether their existing primary prevention efforts sufficiently
protect children.

Federal agencies should support local and state efforts by
• Monitoring lead in air, drinking water, food and consumer products.
• Enforcing laws that control lead contamination.
• Educating specific populations about lead and controlling exposures.
• Improving exposure modeling techniques, accounting for all sources of exposure.
• Conducting research and ongoing evaluation of lead poisoning prevention activities.

Stockman's story is more about not doing something for the people because of their skin color inspite of the fact that HUD dollars were to be used to remedy the problem through the the Fort Wayne-Allen County Health Department.

From Stockman article:

We could always do more, but honestly, at some point in time you’re creating a fear that is beyond that which is warranted. You walk a fine line in any of this stuff in a public health perspective between creating awareness and creating fear,” Roob said.

Educate and we eradicate racial ignorance not by pretending that my association with African-Americans makes me care about the issues that impact the African-American life chances.