BLPC has the responsibility for screening children for lead poisoning, facilitating and monitoring screening conducted by health-care providers, inspecting dwellings of lead-poisoned children for lead-based paint, and ensuring that lead-paint hazards are abated when identified.
Two screening methods are used by providers reporting to BLPC.
Because laboratory tests for lead toxicity reported to BLPC include follow-up tests, estimates of the number of persons screened are obtained by multiplying the number of tests by 0.
BLPC door-to-door screening identified <10% of cases but yielded the highest case-detection rate (1.
Asians and Pacific Islanders accounted for 41% of "other" children enrolled at city clinics and hospitals; the BLPC case registry does not include a separate category for Asians or Pacific Islanders.
BLPC data indicated that the number of children screened annually was 27% greater in 1989 than in 1986, the first full year in which current lead-poisoning criteria were used (Figure 3).
BLPC data indicate that childhood lead poisoning is a persistent public health problem in New York City, as it is in many other cities (1).
