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NYPIRG Sues City, Charging Lead-Poisoning Coverup
By Steven Wishnia
The New York Public Information Research Group has filed suit against the city Department of Health, trying to force it to turn over statistics on the number of children tested for lead poisoning.
The suit was filed June 22 under the state Freedom of Information Law. In 1995, 57% of one- and two-year-olds were tested, but in 1996, only 43% were. The department has acknowledged that records exist for 1997 and later years, but has refused to turn them over.
“The request has been outstanding for almost two years, and they still haven’t produced a single document,” says NYPIRG attorney, Andrew Goldberg. He suspects that the reason is because the number of children tested is still below the 1995 level.
“If they were doing a good job, we wouldn’t be suing them to find out about it,” he says. “In New York City we’re supposed to have universal screening of one- and two-year-olds. The law says it’s supposed to be 100 percent. Fifty-seven percent is no great shakes.”
NYPIRG first requested screening data in October 1998, several months before City Council Speaker Peter Vallone pushed through legislation gutting the city’s lead-paint law. The data was politically significant, Goldberg notes, because Giuliani administration officials were contending that the Department of Health was finding fewer children poisoned at the most severe levels, 20 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. “What they didn’t say was that we’re screening less children,” he says. Last February, the Health Department’s FOIL appeals officer granted NYPIRG’s request for data describing screening levels in New York City from 1995 to 1999. The appeals officer indicated that the department would soon begin to comply, but it has not yet sent NYPIRG any of the relevant records. The appeals officer also granted NYPIRG’s request that the records be made available in electronic form, known as the “LeadQuest” database. The Health Department had wanted to turn them over as a 50,000-page printout, which would cost $12,500 to produce and make it almost impossible to analyze or compare the data.
“A 50,000-page printout is totally useless,” says Goldberg. In the past, he says, the department gave out annual reports showing the ages, numbers, and ethnic breakdown of lead-poisoned children. Opponents of the 1999 law used that data to show that the highest concentrations of severely poisoned children occurred in a belt stretching through central Brooklyn into Queens, and that over 90% of the children diagnosed as severely poisoned in 1996 were black, Latino, or Asian—a statistic dismissed by one bill supporter as racial pandering.
Vallone and Giuliani both promised to expand the city’s screening programs after the law was passed, by sending 10 vans around the city as mobile testing units. Goldberg says this is not an adequate substitute for comprehensive screening in clinics. “How do you find one- and two-year-olds driving a van?” he asks. “Are they in the park playing cards?”