A special report released earlier this week observing areas, including the City of St. Joseph with higher cases of lead poisoning than Flint, Michigan took reporters about two months to complete.

Michael Pell is a Data Journalist with Reuters.  Pell said he began investigating elevated lead levels in children in September with his colleague Joshua Schneyer after covering a story in East Chicago, Indiana.

“The Mayor had to evacuate a housing complex over the summer because of a concern about lead exposure,” Pell said. “If you looked at just the census tract that contained the housing complex on the former industrial site, the Superfund site the percentage of kids with elevated lead levels was much higher than the surrounding areas and the census tract was one of the highest percentages with kids with high lead levels in the state of Indiana.”

Pell said because of that they found that larger testing data sets on county and city levels were obscuring problems in specific neighborhoods. That’s when they decided to submit an open records request to each state for lead testing broken down to the census tract level or by zip-code.  In the end, he said their efforts resulted in data collected from 21 states.

“St. Joseph stood out to us,” Pell said. “There were three census tracts where at least one in five children tested had elevated blood lead levels and there were seven census tracts where 15-percent of the kids tested had elevated blood lead levels.”

In St. Joseph from 2010 to 2015 Pell said around 8,000 children were tested and of those, around 900 tested positive for elevated lead levels.

In November, Pell made the trip from his home in New York to St. Joseph.  That’s when Pell said they spoke to Dr. Cynthia Brownfield who not only works with children with lead problems as a pediatrician with Mosaic Life Care, but also lives in a neighborhood with high levels.

“We spoke with her about some of the tensions in the community between those who want to preserve the historic buildings and also community health,” Pell said. “When you have houses that have been painted god knows how many times, over a nearly 100-year period, with lead paint that puts a lot of lead not just on the walls but every time it chips off, it flakes off or it gets sanded off it puts it in the soil around the house, possibly in the carpet, on the floor, everywhere.”

The Reuters report found nearly 3,000 areas across the country with recently recorded lead poisoning rates at least double those in Flint. Pell said they decided to compare the numbers to Flint based on the public response after children there were exposed to lead in their drinking water.

“People were outraged by Flint.  It captured the imagination of the country and even outside of the country,” Pell said. “Just last week congress approved $170-million in aid to Flint.  Money talks.  That’s how concerned people were. Even in a bipartisan area they could get that approved for the city of Flint.  Now on the other hand, the CDC’s total budget for assistance to the states for lead remediation is $17-million.  So congress approved in one swoop 10 times the amount that the CDC has for the entire rest of the United States.”

“The thought process was; if you were outraged by what happened in Flint that there are other neighborhoods where your outrage factor should be even higher,” Pell said.

St. Joseph was one of the most toxic places in Missouri for lead levels.  However, Viburnum was found to be the worst in the state.

“One of the critical factors there was that Viburnum was a mining town,” Pell said. “For decades there probably wasn’t the best procedures to make sure lead was not escaping the facility.”

Pell and Schneyer visited a total of four communities around the country.  To view the report in full CLICK HERE.