It seems that HUD is doing some testing to see whether or not spreading something they call sludge over the lawns of poor people will decrease the uptake of lead in children. What the sludge is is mostly processed sewage.
Story here
There seem to be several problems with the project:
No one actually seems to be doing the study. They haven’t done any medical testing of the children involved since the “study” started. It is also impossible to know the makeup of any given batch of sludge, so even if it is working in one area they can’t know it will in another.
2)The people in inner cities tend to make bad test subjects because they do not tend to keep the same residences for very long.
3)Although HUD believes that the iron and phosphates in the sludge will bind to iron and make lead in the soil safe to eat, there is no data. Some scientists think that the acidity in the stomach would delete the bind.
There are other potentially harmful toxins in the sludge including at least one case in the 1990s where Thallium showed up in cows and pcbs in Milwaukee parks last year.
The Sludges could lead to more Antibiotic resistant organisms (from here)
Ok. I could go on with what a bad idea this was but here is the biggy…
No one properly informed the residents of anything except that this might be able to keep their kids safe. They didn’t tell them there were concerns over the safety. They didn’t keep track of the kids. Nothing. They thought their kids were safe so they didn’t try to keep the basic precaution of maybe, I don’t know, not letting their kid eat the dirt in the yard.
It seems the guy in charge of starting this one was involved in another inner city lead study that left at least 2 kids severely handicapped. White America is bemused by the anger exibited by Obama’s pastor, and we keep finding this type of story. I am sorry for the lack of proper BBQ language, but I am just sad.
The apparent lack of followup would be the most troubling factor. Why would you do a study designed to evaluate protective effects of composted sludge and not look at lead levels before and afterward? Is this just an incomplete study or did they drop it and not tell the families involved?
I don’t get the claims about harmful bacteria and resistant organisms. Composted sewage sludge should not contain them. And this sort of product is widely sold to gardeners all over the country. It’s not like some secret toxic waste the government is springing on poor people.
From the second linked article Larry Slattery , Arlington County’s Water control chief says,
and Murray McBride, director of the Cornell Waste Management Institute says
I know milorganite is used alot in gardens here but there was a huge thing last summer when they had to close several parks because there were pcbs in the stuff.
Note that many middle-class and wealthy people have been spreading treated sludge, in the form of Milorganite, on their lawns & golf courses for many years. For those not in the know, Milorganite is a fertilizer made from treated sludge from the Milwaukee sewer system.
It’s not so much that the sludge/fertilizer contains the organisms themselves, but that it contains DNA, which can easily be picked up by other bacteria in the environment.
Good story on the phenomenon here. The bit about sludge in particular begins on the bottom of page 2.
Lead poisoning is a huge problem in the inner city here. I think if my kid was at risk I would be willing to have them try anything, but I think that if we are doing research we should do research. Don’t do live experiments on kids then forget to collect the data. Certainly you shouldn’t do those experiments without some kind of informed consent.