SOURCE: VOX
Map & Data: Rad Cunningham (@radcunningham) Washington State Department of Health (@WADeptHealth) Vox (@voxdotcom)
Website: https://www.vox.com/a/lead-exposure-risk-map
Beyond The Map: Seeking GIS / Data folks: Help us create a nation Lead Exposure Risk map
Neighborhoods where kids face the highest risk of lead poisoning exist all across America.
The trouble is that exposure risk is surprisingly difficult estimate, due to a variety of state-by-state differences in reporting standards. So Vox worked with epidemiologists in Washington state to estimate risk levels in every geographic area in America.
"As a parent, I found it very alarming," says Holly Davies, who works in Washington's Department of Ecology on lead exposure reduction. "My son was born in West Virginia, and there it was standard practice that at one year they get screened [for lead poisoning risk]. But here it wasn't a standard thing; I was the one who had to bring it up."
The map you'll see above shows the risk of lead exposure across the United States. The areas where kids are at highest risk of lead exposure — an estimate calculated using government data about the surroundings — are scattered all across the country.
These are the bright red areas in the map you see above — the places that public health researchers have identified as having the highest risk of lead exposure. You can see that the vast majority cluster in urban areas.
In some of America's oldest and largest urban areas, places like New York and Chicago, one in five census tracts — geographic areas that usually have between 1,200 and 8,000 people — have very high risks of lead exposure. (We use a scale of one to 10 we use in the map above; these areas rank as a 10.)
In younger metro areas, like Los Angeles, risks are smaller but still present; 12 percent of census tracts there have risk scores of 10. And it's important to remember that public health experts say no level of lead exposure is safe for children.