Two out of three children under age six in Chicago are exposed to dangerously high levels of lead in wateraccording to a study published this week in the journal of the American Medical Association.
“The extent of lead contamination in Chicago’s tap water is disheartening”said Benjamin Huynh, lead author of the study.
“It’s not something we should see in 2024,” added the also professor in the Department of Health and Environmental Engineering at John Hopkins University, in Maryland.
The expert regretted that 19 percent of the affected children They use unfiltered tap water as their primary source of drinking liquid.
Lead Exposure Poses Significant Health Risks Therefore, there have been successful large-scale efforts to reduce the presence of the metal in paints or gasoline, the researchers noted.
“However, lead contamination in drinking water remains a public health problem,” added the article.
He stressed that lead exposure can have serious health consequences, particularly in children, including developmental deficits, cardiovascular complications, chronic kidney disease and neurological complications.
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For their research, Huynh’s team analyzed lead exposure on the results of an inspection of samples of 38,385 homes collected by the city’s Water Department between January 2016 and September 2023.
Huynh and his collaborators used an artificial intelligence technique that, through Algorithms calculated lead levels in tap water throughout the city.
The analysis found that Approximately 75 percent of Chicago residential blocks received lead-contaminated waterand that more than two thirds of children under six years of age live in blocks exposed to that water.
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Like many other cities in the United States, Chicago still has lead pipes in service that were mandatory until a federal ban in 1986.
The study calculated that the city in Illinois has almost 400,000 lead pipes, each serving one home.r, this is the highest figure among all cities in the country.
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