Lead is a metal that is toxic to people. There is no safe level of lead in your body. It can cause learning and behavior problems, and delay physical growth and mental development.

In the past, it was used in gasoline, paint, ceramics, caulking, pipes and solder. In 1960, NYC banned the use of lead-based paint in homes. A national ban came into effect in 1978. Leaded gasoline was phased out beginning in the 1970’s. However, lead can still be found in some products and in our environment. Layers of lead paint may still be present in older buildings and can become dangerous when the paint chips or peels or is abraded, or when renovations or repairs are conducted without properly controlling dust. Families living in older, poorly maintained housing are at higher risk for lead poisoning.

Lead Hazards

People may be exposed to lead by absorbing, breathing or swallowing lead or lead dust.

The main source of childhood lead poisoning is lead-based paint in older, deteriorated housing. Children with lead poisoning may develop health, learning and behavioral problems. These effects can persist long after the exposure has stopped and a child’s blood lead level has declined. Fetal exposure to lead may also result in cognitive and developmental problems.

For adults, the main sources of lead poisoning are:

• Consumer products that contain lead
• Exposure at work - especially for people in construction, who may breath lead dust during work that disturbs old lead paint.

Childhood lead testing

All children should be tested for lead poisoning at ages one and two. Health care providers should also test other children found to be at risk and annually assess children from six months to six years of age for lead exposure risk.

In 2012, CDC established that a blood lead level of 5 mcg/dL is the reference level for exposure to lead in children. This level is used to identify children who have blood lead levels higher than most children’s levels.

Prevention

To prevent exposure to lead hazards:

• Call 311 if you live in a one- or two-family house with peeling paint and have a child under six years old. Ask for the Health Department’s Healthy Homes Program (HHP).
• Call 311 if your landlord does not fix peeling paint, or if you think repair work is being done unsafely.
• Wash floors, window sills, hands, toys and pacifiers often.
• Do not use imported foods, spices, clay pots and dishes, medicines, toys and cosmetics that have been found to contain lead.

More information

• Lead Poisoning
• Annual Report

There are many schemes of neighborhood boundaries (or geographies) available for different datasets. These include:

• Citywide
• Borough
• United Hospital Fund 42 (UHF42) and United Hospital Fund 34 (UHF34) neighborhoods
• Community Districts (CD), and, related, Community District Tabulation Areas (CDTA)
• Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMA)
• Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (NTA)

We try to make data available at as fine a geographic resolution as we can. Read more about different geographies at this data story.

It would be convenient if each dataset could be made available at the same geography, but this is not always possible. The neighborhood boundaries available depend on the specifics of the underlying dataset.

When we have multiple years of data, we show the data as trend charts.

Trends for individual neighborhoods tend to be very unstable (or "bouncy"), due to small counts for outcomes in individual neighborhoods. To show clearer trends, we usually aggregate up and show trend data by Borough.

Options on some indicators let you compare this indicator to other similar indicators.

We try to make data available as soon as we can.

Many datasets take a long time to reach us — a "lag" of several years, during which data are gathered from different entities to try to create a complete dataset; data are processed (cleaned, deduplicated, etc), and analyzed. It can take several years to prepare a dataset — so a dataset that is several years old is sometimes the most up-to-date information available. Still, this data continues to show us valuable trends and insights.

We also try to display datasets that have been available for many years. Some datasets (like those that are asked on surveys) are not asked every year of the survey, which means that we cannot provide annual data.

For some datasets, we have to aggregate time periods in order to break down data by borough or neighborhood.

Measures are the numeric ways that a dataset (or indicator) are expressed. Examples of different measures might be: number, percent or rate.

A number tells us how much of an outcome is in a certain area. But a rate (usually expressed as, for example, 40 per 100,000) tells us how much of an outcome there is, relative to the population of the area in question. This lets us compare neighborhoods of different sizes.

On this site, we try to show how environmental factors might be connected to health outcomes. One way we do this is with Correlates. We choose potentially-related datasets and display them on a scatterplot so you can see how these two datasets are correlated.

The Disparities view displays neighborhoods by poverty category to show underlying disparities in the data.

Read more about correlation here.