Every room in her Bronx apartment the walls, the doors, the window sills was completely contaminated with peeling lead-based paint.
Lead poisoning is a lot different from food poisoning or sun poisoning.
Lead poisoning is dangerous and can cause learning disabilities, severe brain damage, and in some cases, death. Health officials estimate that an equal number have lead poisoning but have not been screened for it. The city uses a threshold that is half as stringent as the standard used by federal authorities, so the number of new victims could be more than 8,000 a year. With more old buildings with lead paint than any place in the country, New York has had a program for decades to remove the danger. But, as with most aspects of the government that have to do with the poor, enforcement is a joke.