CLICK FOR SLIDESHOW: A sign on the front of a building warns residents to filter their water, Jan. 17, 2016, in Flint, Mich. (Bill Pugliano/Getty Images) More

In Flint, Mich., testing has found lead levels of more than 5 micrograms per deciliter of blood in 4 percent of that city’s children. The result is national outrage.

In neighborhoods of New Orleans and Boston, New York and Baltimore, across the country in urban pockets much the same size as Flint, those same levels are regularly found in up to 25 percent of children.



“That hasn’t been getting the same kind of attention,” says Howard Mielke, a professor in the department of pharmacology of Tulane University whose research includes mapping lead blood levels across urban populations. “Maybe what’s happening in Flint will shine a spotlight on the fact that lead risk is everywhere.”

Mielke and other experts agree that the outrage over Flint is well warranted. The fact that the problem was created by one government entity and then ignored by several others makes it particularly heinous, they say. But they would also like to see some of the same call to action for other neighborhoods where Flint-like levels of exposure are the norm.

“I think it’s perfectly appropriate to rally around Flint,” says Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and dean for global health at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. “But people need to realize that Flint is not an isolated example and there are places that are even worse. It’s happening all over the country and it’s tightly tied to race, ethnicity and economic circumstances.”

Then he starts ticking off locations: “Central Harlem. Bushwick. Roxbury in Boston. Baltimore is probably the worst. New Orleans, another city that has lead paint and poorly maintained housing.”

Unlike Flint, where the source of the lead is drinking water, the cause in most other places is paint and soil. Until 1978 all paint contained lead, and until 1996, when lead was finally banned in gasoline, car fumes mixed with soil, remaining toxic for decades. Young children explore the world by putting it in their mouths, and both paint chips from the floor and dirt from outside play carry the lead into their bodies. The younger the brain, the more vulnerable it is to toxins, and the damage is irreversible — causing such problems as learning disabilities, attention deficits, reduction in IQ and anger-management issues.

Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of the invisible damage caused by lead is what happens when the element is eliminated. In several studies around the country, Landrigan says, researchers graphed the drop in lead blood levels in a community after lead was banned in gasoline there, and then graphed the murder rate in those same communities 20 years later (when the children in the original graph reached adulthood). “The slope of the decrease was exactly the same,” he says.

Other studies, he says, have shown that the lead levels in the blood of incarcerated youth are higher than those of non-incarcerated youth from the same neighborhoods.

CLICK FOR SLIDESHOW: The National Guard receives water samples from residents at a fire station Jan. 21, 2016, in Flint, Mich. (Sarah Rice/Getty Images) More