Life after lead poisoning
The residents of Frazers Content in St Catherine remember well the lead poisoning episode there 14 years ago.
At the start of the outbreak, health authorities found that 44 per cent of the community’s pre-school children had elevated levels of lead in their blood, causing many of them to be hospitalised.
Soil and household dust samples (24 per cent in either case) exceeded the acceptable levels of lead.
“We used to have an old battery company in the area and plenty of the people used to work there,” explained Marjorie Hamilton, more popularly known as Sister. “It close down in 1988 but plenty people used to steal the lead and carry it to their house to do their own battery making, so that was what cause the problem.”
According to Hamilton, who operates a bar in the community and was born there in 1957, many persons were unknowingly exposed to lead because of the formal and informal motor vehicle battery industry there.
“The yard that Marcia (Robinson) live in used to be one of the main areas for them to carry the battery, but when her family buy the place they did not know that they used to melt the lead there,” said Hamilton.
Robinson has lived to regret that purchase. For, her daughter, nine year-old Oshine Robinson, is retarded and has never been to school, having been exposed to high levels of lead since infancy.
So bad was the outbreak – 103 children hospitalised over a three-year period – that health insurance firm, Blue Cross of Jamaica, went into the community, formerly known as Red Pond District, and worked, for five years, with the residents to remove top soil from yards found to have high levels of lead.
“I helped them to move the dirt,” recalled Hamilton. “At Marcia’s house, for example, we took out about four or five truck loads of the black dirt with the lead.”
The contaminated soil was removed to a designated site where it was later buried as instructed by the Natural Resources Conservation Authority, now known as the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA). Top soil was then trucked into the area and placed in the yards by the Environmental Health Foundation.
In addition, alternative sources of employment were sought for the persons operating backyard battery repair shops and for the families with sick children.
The Blue Cross initiative apparently had some effect because, according to Hamilton, most of the children are better now. However, a few parents, like Marcia Robinson, still need help because their children are retarded and they have had difficulty finding jobs.
Robinson told the Sunday Observer that her difficulty was finding someone to take care of Oshine in order to free her to seek a job.
“Nobody will keep her for me, so it is very difficult,” she said. “I can do a little sewing, but because of her I cannot go out and do any hustling. She cannot talk or even change her clothes or anything like that so she needs a lot of attention.”
The difficulties being experienced by Robinson and the other parents in Frazers Content has not been lost on Blue Cross, as the firm, in association with the Environmental Health Foundation (EHF), has planned a second phase of its assistance programme.
“Phase two of the project would review the outcome and see where the community is now,” said former Blue Cross CEO Henry Lowe.
“We could identify any other interventions and see what aspects of alternate employment are in place there,” he said.
Lowe admitted that the 1990s alternate employment effort “did not work out too well”. Therefore, Blue Cross and the EHF were interested in helping to rehabilitate the families and parents affected.
He said that a proposal had been drafted for the second phase of the project, but additional funding was being sought to start implementing it by “the third quarter of this year”.
According to Lowe, a public education programme would definitely be a part of the second phase.
“We would also want a public education component because something like this could happen in another community,” he told the Sunday Observer. “If the situation in Red Pond had not been quickly cleaned up the community would have had to be abandoned,” he said.
Phase two of the project, Lowe added, would also include:
. further testing of current lead concentrations in water, soil and the blood levels of residents in the area; and
. a post-evaluation of the degree to which the residents have adopted sound environmental practices and alternative forms of income-generation based on the training provided in phase one.
The plan, particularly the public education component, found favour with Hamilton. “I would be glad if they could do something like that,” she said, remembering that it was the children who were the worst affected by the poisoning.
“They would play in the dirt and so on, so they got a lot more exposure to it. But most of us had the lead poisoning,” she said to nods of agreement from Robinson.
“You felt a sweetness in your throat and sometimes you could not breathe properly. We were also inhaling some of the fumes from the factory when it was in operation.”
According to scientists, children suffering from lead poisoning can experience reduction in their IQ, hearing and growth, as well as behavioural problems, impaired nerve function, anaemia, kidney damage and severe brain damage depending on the level of exposure.
In Oshine Robinson’s case, the high lead levels in her body were discovered after a visit to the doctor when she was nine months old.
“She fell and hit her head at that time so we took her to the hospital to make sure everything was okay,” her mother said. “That was when they found out that she had the lead in her. Because of that, she had to go to (Bustamante) Children’s Hospital every month for an injection. It is only about a year or so since she stopped.
“Growing up, we realised that she was late in everything – up to now she can’t put on her clothes by herself. She can’t speak well – she can only call my name.
“She can’t say when she wants to use the bathroom so most times she messes up herself. I know, though, that she has the ability to learn. I would love to see her in a home where she can stay and I can get her on weekends or so. That way I could do some work.”
While Robinson admitted that she was not sure whether it was the fall or the lead exposure that caused the retardation in her daughter, she expressed a desire for some assistance from organisations like Blue Cross.
“I appreciate what they have done already because they cleaned up my yard and helped me re-render the walls of my house which were very contaminated,” Robinson said. “But if they could find somewhere for me to put her I would appreciate it. I don’t want to give her away but I want to set myself so that I can maintain her.”
Robinson’s anguish is shared by Norman Lewis, whose 17 year-old son, Johnny, is also retarded as a result of exposure to lead.
“One morning when he was a baby, me see him foaming at the mouth,” explained Lewis. “We rush him to Spanish Town Hospital and they transferred him immediately to Children’s Hospital. They realised then, that him full up with the lead.”
Lewis and his son lived next door to the Robinsons. They have since moved from that contaminated yard.
“You know how much money we spend on doctor bill for him?” Lewis declared. “He had to go to hospital every month for an injection. They had to change out all the blood in his body at one point,” he said, making reference to chelation therapy, a form of treatment that cleanses lead from the blood.
“He started school at three years and the teachers realised that he was slow,” continued Lewis. “He is now at a school for the disabled, but it has been tough. He is very overweight and weighs about 250 pounds. He also does not talk much to us. It is very difficult for us parents and I think they should educate us on issues like this and how to deal with it.”
Lowe agreed, saying that the need for public awareness is great because there was no national policy or plan to deal with the disposal of car batteries and other materials that can cause lead poisoning.
“With all the cars that we are importing, and no seemingly clearly defined way to dispose of the batteries from them, another Frazers Content could easily happen,” Lowe argued.
Approximately 120,000 car batteries are discarded every year, according to the 2001 environmental report prepared by the Statistical Institute of Jamaica and NEPA. “Some 50 per cent is collected and exported to the USA, while the rest remains in the Jamaican environment without control,” the report said.
In 1999, over 383 tonnes of used car batteries were exported and another 86 tons re-exported.
NEPA also revealed that while it worked with local battery companies to collect batteries, it did not have any system in place to do the collections itself.
“In the future, we are looking at ways to deal with it on a country level,” said one NEPA official. “We can continue to work with the battery shops and also to get a landfill specially equipped to deal with that, but we don’t have the money for that at this point.”