A U.S. Lead Exposure Hotspots Analysis

To identify U.S. lead exposure risk hotspots, we expanded upon geospatial statistical methods from a published Michigan case study. The evaluation of identified hotspots using five lead indices, based on housing age and sociodemographic data, showed moderate-to-substantial agreement with state-identified higher-risk locations from nine public health department reports (45–78%) and with hotspots of children’s blood lead data from Michigan and Ohio (e.g., Cohen’s kappa scores of 0.49–0.63). Applying geospatial cluster analysis and 80th–100th percentile methods to the lead indices, the number of U.S. census tracts ranged from ∼8% (intersection of indices) to ∼41% (combination of indices). Analyses of the number of children