Officials at both institutions emphasized that community leaders were consulted before the study, that participants were fully informed and that compost material is safe and widely used. Officials said there was no reason to monitor the health of residents because the compost posed no risk.
The cost of replacing soil is prohibitive in all but the most contaminated areas, they said. Confidentiality rules prohibit releasing the identities of the residents who lived in the homes.
They also noted that most of the work on the study was conducted in 2000 - when lead poisoning was a severe problem - and that work at Kennedy Krieger and Bloomberg has been instrumental in reducing the incidence of lead poisoning in Baltimore over the past decade.
California Sen. Barbara Boxer's Environment and Public Works Committee had planned hearings on the safety of government-funded studies in which scientists put fertilizers and compost materials into soils before the East Baltimore story appeared, but now will include a review of the Hopkins study.
A similar study was conducted in poor neighborhoods in East St. Louis, Ill., but officials there say there have been no health problems reported, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The Southwestern Illinois Resource Conservation & Development Inc., the nonprofit organization that conducted the East St. Louis project, stood by its study methods last week and said there were no reports of health problems in the seven years since its completion.
"We used the best science available at the time," Dave Eustis, executive director of the organization, told the newspaper.
East St. Louis Mayor Alvin Parks told the newspaper he would go to the site to investigate and that he will ask the EPA to test the soil for any effects.
"This hit me completely out of the blue," Parks said.
dennis.obrien@baltsun.com
