Research Realities in Trail (1993)

Since its formation in 1990, the Trail Community Lead Task Force had generally operated under the premise that environmental remediation and in-home interventions should not be conducted with proof that they will be effective in reducing children’s blood lead levels. However, some actions (e.g. community education, in-home counselling, greening of public areas, dust control on unpaved alleys) had been implemented early and had helped garner community support and involvement. This paper explained the very significant challenges in proving the effectiveness of remediation and intervention actions. It argued that to delay implementing additional relative low-cost actions for sake of further study would risk jeopardizing community support and would likely not lead to proof of measurable benefit from individual actions.  The paper recommended instead that the focus should be on evaluating the entire package of actions in Trail by comparing trends in annual blood lead data for Trail, compared against declines in global background blood lead levels.