Pennsylvania

Lancaster County has the fourth highest rate of childhood lead poisoning in Pennsylvania. The City of Lancaster is the largest city in the county and has the fourth highest rate of children with blood lead levels above the blood lead reference value (BLRV) of 3.5 micrograms per deciliter (μg/dL) among the 12 municipalities included in the annual lead surveillance report.  The vast majority of the City of Lancaster’s housing stock was built before 1978, when lead-based paint was banned.

In 2019, the City of Lancaster was awarded $9.1 million for lead hazard control plus an additional $600,000 of healthy homes supplemental funding to systematically make 710 housing units lead safe in Lancaster City over 5 years. The city’s Lead Hazard Control Program (LHCP) prioritizes children with blood lead levels (BLLs) at or above 3.5 μg/dL. Because Lancaster does not have a municipal health department, they were not able to identify children with higher BLLs and their addresses to help with remediation. The Pennsylvania Department of Health (DOH) wanted to link families of children with higher BLLs in Lancaster to the city’s LHCP for remediation.

In 2022, the DOH and City of Lancaster implemented a data sharing agreement to quickly identify children with higher BLLs and their addresses so they could be referred to the city’s LHCP for timely and effective outreach and lead hazards remediation.

A memorandum of understanding was signed between the City of Lancaster and the DOH on May 4, 2022.  The DOH agreed to provide the names, addresses, BLL, phone number, and guardian names for children younger than age 16 years with BLLs at or above the BLRV going back to January 2021 and weekly going forward. The first data transfer was completed on September 14, 2022.

The DOH identified 523 children younger than age 16 years with a BLL at or above 3.5 μg/dL in the City of Lancaster between January 2021 and December 2022. Since the expansion of the program in 2020, Lancaster has been able to remediate lead hazards in over 100 properties with half of those completed in 2022. The collaboration between the City of Lancaster and the DOH will ensure that children who are most at risk of lead exposure are benefited by this program.

Pennsylvania was not able to submit childhood blood lead data to CDC from mid-2015 through March 2018 after a software change disabled the data transmission process. Therefore, visitors to websites managed by the Pennsylvania Lead Surveillance Program and the CDC Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program would not get an accurate and up-to-date picture of the burden of childhood lead exposure in Pennsylvania. This was particularly unfortunate in a state with several lead-related industries, Superfund sites, and a high proportion of older housing (a known source of lead).

The Pennsylvania childhood lead program worked with their IT group to rebuild the data extraction and transmission process to enable the data transmission process. On March 30, 2018, Pennsylvania began quarterly submissions as a newly funded CDC EH17-1701 recipient. Pennsylvania was able to fill the 3-year data gap and continues to submit current data to CDC.

As a result of reestablishing the sharing of childhood lead surveillance data with CDC, Pennsylvania strengthened surveillance of childhood lead poisoning in the state. This will improve data usage, leading to greater identification of geographic areas and populations at high-risk for lead exposure and an increased ability to target interventions to high-risk geographic areas and populations.