TOXIC AVENGERS
City pols rip mayor for NYCHA lead lies, push probe
Elected officials blasted the de Blasio administration Sunday for keeping secret the true scope of lead poisoning in children living in city public housing apartments.
The response came after the Daily News revealed Sunday that while the mayor has claimed for months only a handful of children registered elevated blood-lead levels, the city Health Department knew there were 820 children living in NYCHA who have been harmed.
City Controller Scott Stringer announced he would open an investigation into the way the city Health Department tracks blood-lead levels in children.
“This deception must end today,” he said. “It is horrifying that the Department of Health kept this information under wraps and it is outrageous that the city continues to justify and minimize this scandal.”
Public Advocate Letitia James called the revelations “disgraceful and inexcusable” and renewed her call for the state Health Department to take over lead screening of children living in NYCHA and make the results public.
And Council Speaker Corey Johnson questioned why City Hall suddenly reversed course on the standards it used to initiate lead paint investigations of children in public housing with elevated bloodlead levels.
For years the city Health Department did not follow federal Centers for Disease Control standards initiated in 2012 that recommended a thorough investigation of children with blood-lead levels of 5 micrograms per deciliter or more. Instead it used a much more conservative standard of 10 micrograms to trigger an investigation and didn’t inform NYCHA of hundreds of children who’d tested for the level CDC said was of concern.
But suddenly in January it reversed course and adopted the CDC standard for children living in public housing. It did not notify the public of the change until Sunday when The News published its investigation.
They also did not inform the City Council of the change in protocol until last week as The News was demanding the data.
On Sunday, Johnson stated, “At no point did the administration tell the Council that they’d changed the standards for NYCHA lead cases. I don’t know why they withheld that information.”
Councilman Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx), chairman of the Committee on Investigations, added, “I am even more appalled by the administration’s deceit than I was before. If the administration adopted the CDC’s standard back in January, then why are we hearing about it for the first time now?”
In May, the Council took up a bill to require the use of the CDC standard going forward.
Speaker Johnson said he was working to “finalize the lead package and quickly update our laws. When complete we will enact the strongest lead poisoning protection laws in the world. Thank you to the Daily News for exposing this issue. I’m outraged and saddened at this whole situation.”
On Sunday, The News asked Mayor de Blasio why the change was not made public for six months. A spokeswoman, Olivia Lapeyrolerie, said the administration “wanted to evaluate the effectiveness of how these new regulations worked at NYCHA before deciding to expand citywide.”
Lapeyrolerie ridiculed Stringer’s announcement, stating “The comptroller seems to be reacting to tabloid headlines instead of concrete public health evidence. The CDC guidance is clear, and the Health Department has always followed it.”
In fact, the Health Department did not follow the CDC’s instructions that an investigation be completed to discover the source of the lead between 2012 and this past January.
The de Blasio administration has for months insisted only 19 young children living in NYCHA had elevated blood-lead that resulted in the authority doing a lead paint cleanup in their apartments.
Data uncovered by the News show the health department was aware of 820 children under 6 living in public housing between 2012 and 2016 had tested for blood-lead at a level that the CDC deemed of concern.
Because the city Health Department used the higher standard of 10 micrograms it did not do the follow-up inspections of their apartments to discover the source of the lead that CDC says should be done.