The town hall of Gennevilliers in Hauts-de-Seine is launching a lead screening campaign from Tuesday. Around a hundred children from CP to CE1 who attended a leisure center in the City are likely to have been poisoned.
“Lead ! There’s a lot of it, but it’s not evenly distributed across the field. It depends on each sample that was taken. We found lead below and above the standards”explains Patrice Leclerc, the mayor of Gennevilliers.
At the beginning of the year, the City received a voluminous 170-page report. A soil pollution study carried out on a large plot located within the grounds of a leisure center, the Yuri Gagarin childhood home. It is on this territory that the municipality plans to begin construction of the city’s fourth college next year.
The conclusions of the study report are formal. No copper detected, nor the presence of gas, but hydrocarbons and lead in sufficiently large quantities for the municipality to initially decide to close and move this leisure center created more than 40 years ago.
At 27, rue de la Couture d’Auxerre, behind the buildings facing the street and a tarmac entrance, there is the playground of the Youri Gagarine leisure center. “4,000 square meters of plants”. This is where children of elementary school age between 6 and 11 had fun.
The mayor puts forward three hypotheses on the origin of this contamination of these lands. “Pollution due to the use of leaded gasoline (…) as was found in the agricultural plain of Argenteuil.”
Second hypothesis : “the company which was installed there, before the leisure center, did not clean up the pollution”, or another even older cause: “Gennevilliers was a market gardening plain at the beginning of the 19th century on which Paris sewers were spread. adds the city councilor.
Whatever happens, the municipality has also decided “as a precaution“to initiate a screening campaign for around a hundred children in agreement with the ARS. For the Regional Health Agency, the lead concentrations found in this plot “justify a check of the potential impregnation of children, by measuring the lead in the blood (blood lead). The High Council of Public Health recommends having this analysis (blood lead) carried out in children under 7 years of age.” This screening campaign is aimed primarily at younger children who could have ingested soil while playing.
“Lead can be dangerous for children at very low doses, that is to say that a child who has been exposed for one to two years will do more damage than severe lead poisoning. a given moment”, explains Morgan Pinoteau, member of the association of families affected by lead poisoning.
In young children, the risk is notably the reduction in cognitive performance and behavioral disorders, explains the association. “Lead remains in the blood for a month, if it is partially eliminated, it will get into the soft tissues and it will be stored in the bones,” she adds.
Read also : Lead in certain Parisian schools, according to a study carried out by the City
In Gennevilliers, we will have to wait for the analysis results. To raise awareness among concerned parents, the municipality sent them a letter at the end of last week. The screening campaign takes place on April 30, May 2 and 3. “The city covers all screening costs”specifies the city councilor.
“If there are a lot of children in whom we detected lead, we will know that it comes from the center.”
Patrice Leclerc, mayor of Gennevilliers.
“If there are only two or three, the ARS will carry out an environmental search around the family,” adds the mayor. A survey which will make it possible to identify all the places that the child frequents, and where there may be lead.
The mayor of Gennevilliers wants to be reassuring. “L‘ARS tells us that for five years, there have been no cases of lead poisoning and over ten years, there have been five cases, but not from this neighborhood.”
Measures to clean up the rue Couture site, which is to host the future college, are already being considered. In the meantime, the municipality intends to check all its green spaces “where no work is planned”.
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