When University Public Health Professor Hailu Kassa met the 10-year-old boy, the child was unable to speak coherently.

The young Toledo resident struggled in school and had trouble concentrating on anything for extended periods of time. His parents and teachers assumed he was born with a low intelligence quotient and a serious learning disability.

But a blood test revealed that the boy’s condition was preventable. He had severe lead-poisoning, caused by the paint in his home.

Scenarios like this one motivate Kassa and University environmental health professor Gary Silverman to prevent lead-poisoning in children. With a two-year, $49,000 grant from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, the University’s Environmental Health Program is working with residents of Toledo’s Lagrange neighborhood to reduce lead levels in households with children.

Local and state health departments as well as representatives of the Lagrange Development Corporation are participating in the program, which is expected to take three years.

Co-principal investigators Kassa and Silverman developed the lead-removal program, which began this summer. The program will involve 100 households with children from infancy to age six to teach the dangers of the lead and supplies they need to reduce the amount of lead that accumulates in doorways and window frames, where lead paint creates dust.

All of the homes selected by the program were built before 1978, when the federal government banned lead paint.

“Lead is very well-known as a very important environmental contaminant, particularly for children,” Silverman said. “We knew, just because we live here, that Toledo has a big problem. So we looked into literature to see what other people are doing, and the best long-term solution is to actually remove the lead, but that is extremely expensive.”

Silverman said that to remove lead altogether, homes would have to be demolished and new homes would have to be built, an impractical solution in the economically distressed neighborhood of Lagrange. Therefore, the aim of the Lagrange lead-removal program is to teach households to reduce lead-levels.

“This is a train-the-trainers program,” Kassa said. “The past method was for a health nurse to go [to a lead-contaminated home], give them literature and walk out.”

The method Kassa and Silverman have developed allows chosen members of the Lagrange community to train their neighbors in the use of specialized cleaning techniques. The chosen community members will be trained by health officials before passing on their knowledge to others.

According to Silverman, the trainers will visit homes once a month for 16 months to try to ingrain lead-removal techniques in people’s cleaning routines.

Children in the homes will have periodic blood testing to determine the effectiveness of the program, Kassa said.

“Young kids are the ones at high risk in the first place because their brains are not well-developed,” he said. “Most of these [children] stay at home and therefore their risk of exposure is very high.”

The affects of lead poisoning are severe especially in children, Silverman said.

“[Lead] affects the ability of blood to carry oxygen,” he said. “In children, what’s developing really fast is their central nervous system, including the brain. So if they don’t get all the oxygen that they need, they don’t develop the brain and central nervous system correctly.”

High levels of lead in the bloodstream can cause serious health problems and even death in children, according to Kassa. With lower lead levels in children, however, the direct effects of lead are not visible.

“The effects can be subtle,” Silverman said. “For example, someone can be born and their genetic code says they should have an IQ of 120. But because of lack of oxygen to the brain, when they grow up, they have an IQ of 100.”

Silverman and Kassa are confident and hopeful that their program will be a success.

“If it’s successful, we’ll publish [our findings] and hopefully other communities can use the same approach,” Silverman said. “We can help people wherever there are a lot of people who don’t have resources to clean up lead contamination.”