Lead Risk Index
The National Minority Quality Forum has launched the Lead Risk Index to help health-care practitioners, policymakers, advocacy groups and industry gain a full understanding of childhood lead poisoning at the local level.
Nationally, an estimated 750,000 children under age six have an elevated blood lead level of 5 micrograms per deciliter or above, the level that represents the CDC's reference value for lead poisoning in children.
“Because it is difficult to get a true picture of the lead issue at a local level, our approach combines an intuitive user interface with currently available data from National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and state agencies, to provide the granularity needed for communities to take preventive action.”
Lead Poisoning FAQs
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About the Index
The National Minority Quality Forum has launched the Lead Risk Index to help health-care practitioners, policymakers, advocacy groups and industry gain a full understanding of childhood lead poisoning at the local level.
This internet-based resource enables users to map the estimated prevalence of elevated blood levels, total counts and average blood lead levels in children under age six at the zip-code level nationally as well as within individual states, counties, metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) and federal and state legislative districts. In addition to mapping these parameters for the total population of children under age six (overall), the index also maps them by gender and race/ethnicity. The Index also provides users the opportunity to map the percentage of housing built prior to 1980 (when lead paint was finally banned) as well as the estimated number of children under age six living in pre-1980 housing in any geography down to the zip code level. Index users can generate color-coded maps and charts of the estimated prevalence of the elevated blood lead levels, total counts and average blood lead levels in children under age six, as well as this housing information, for downloading, printing, and dissemination to support educational and advocacy initiatives.
According to Gary Puckrein, PhD, President and CEO of the National Minority Quality Forum and developer of the Index: “Because it is difficult to get a true picture of the lead issue at a local level, our approach combines an intuitive user interface with currently available data from National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and state agencies, to provide the granularity needed for communities to take preventive action."
Methodology
Lead is highly toxic, especially to young children under 6. It can harm a child’s brain, kidneys, bone marrow, and other body systems. The most common source of lead exposure for children today is lead paint in older housing and the contaminated dust and soil it generates. [1] To eliminate lead poisoning problems for children, it is critical to identify communities with high lead poisoning risk, so that prevention and treatment resources can be allocated to where they are most needed. To accomplish this, we modeled lead risk metrics by the demographic risk factors of gender, race/ethnicity, age, poverty status, old housing stock, as well as county level blood lead test data using Bayesian hierarchical regression models. The model data includes the 2005–2010 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) [2], and CDC’s state surveillance data on Blood lead tests. [3] We then applied the models to zip code demographics to estimate lead risk within zip codes. We aggregated the zip code estimates of lead risk to higher geographical levels—including federal and state legislative districts, metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), counties and states—through crosswalk tables.