Our lead-risk map is built only from public housing age and poverty data. It has never seen a blood test. We held it against Wisconsin's real childhood blood-lead, tract by tract. Here is the prediction next to what was measured.
Hover any neighborhood to compare both numbers. Where the maps share color, the prediction matched reality.
A risk map is only worth trusting if it agrees with where children were actually poisoned. In Wisconsin it does, at the strength the original EPA study reported. Most of the country has no public blood-lead map at all. A prediction from data every neighborhood already has brings the same warning everywhere.
Sources: Wisconsin childhood lead poisoning surveillance by census tract, Wisconsin DHS (ArcGIS open data). Predicted risk: U.S. Census ACS 2022 housing age + poverty, scored by DetectLead.
