What Lead Paint Could Teach Us About Homelessness
Lead is tasty but please don’t eat it
Lead is very bad for humans. Especially children. Its most troubling effects include permanent cognitive impairment, irrationality, anger, and susceptibility to addiction.
Up until the mid-80s, the level of lead in children was extremely high. This was in part because gasoline was leaded, so children were breathing air full of lead, there were fewer restrictions on pollution, and lead paint was used in nearly every house (and on children’s toys). Lead paint also happens to taste very sweet, and kids love to eat it. Not great.
Anyway, they did a lot of studies and found that for every 10 micrograms per deciliter of lead in the body, children lost an average of four IQ points. Back then, it was only considered a problem if children had more than 60 micrograms per deciliter (now we consider anything over 5 an issue, but there’s likely no safe amount).
Four IQ points may not seem like much in the case of any individual, but across a population, the impact is huge. IQ scores improved, and the reduction of lead levels is even cited as a reason for the steep and otherwise unexplained reduction of crime in the 90s.
I believe that the reduction of lead levels is not just a one-off, but an example of a type of solution that could be applied to many problems.
What is the lead paint of homelessness?
One candidate here is traumatic brain injuries (TBIs). Ask anyone who has had a TBI (this includes garden-variety concussions) and they will assure you that it’s a terrible experience. It can take weeks to recover from even the most minor of concussions, and during that recovery period it’s difficult to focus, nearly impossible to be productive -- you’re irritable, distractible, nauseous, and headachey.
Furthermore, the long-term effects of concussions are even worse. They compound: each concussion makes you more susceptible to subsequent ones, and each subsequent one will be worse. Everyone knows the data on football players at this point.
Really solid data is a bit tricky to get for homeless populations, but here are some numbers. The prevalence of TBIs among the homeless population was found to be 63% (I also want to stress that I believe many forms of TBI, such as a concussion that does not result in a blackout, seeing stars, or any loss of consciousness, are often under-reported).
70% of these folks who had some sort of TBI had their first TBI before becoming homeless (but this also means that 30% of them received their first TBI while homeless). All homeless people are at a much higher risk of being concussed than the general population. Being homeless is dangerous for TBIs for a myriad of reasons. There is violence on the street, nearly every surface around is hard concrete, and additionally, drug and alcohol use has much higher consequences: passing out and falling over will likely result in a concussion.
I can’t stress enough how bad serious concussions are. TBIs can produce not only the relatively subtle symptoms of mild cognitive impairment, irritability, impulsivity, increased proclivity for addiction, but also very un-subtle symptoms like severe mental illness and schizophrenia.
Are you suggesting we give them helmets?
That would probably work, but no.
I’m interested in the research coming out about the neuroprotective role of vitamin D and E, and their ability to decrease the severity of TBIs. This, compounded with the fact that the vast majority of the homeless population has some degree of nutritional deficiency (and the majority of the housed US population is vitamin D deficient), seems to indicate that working with shelters and soup kitchens to provide nutritional supplements of these vitamins could have a serious positive impact.
Reducing the lead level in children showed that minor improvements in cognition across a population can have dramatic effects. For the homeless population, reducing the severity and length of concussions would have a tremendous impact.
