Editor's note: this version corrects information from the original version.

New London — Resembling a weapon that might be wielded by an alien from a 1950s science fiction flick, the XRF Niton Analyzer gun’s X-ray beam probed the invisible hazards inside a run-down house on Belden Street.

But Katie Baldwin, the lead healthy homes coordinator for Ledge Light Health District who was aiming the gun, was not alien to environments where lead paint might be lurking, as she checked every wall, door jam, closet, window pane, ceiling and stairway. With her for the inspection last Wednesday morning was Marilyn Graham, who heads the non-profit group planning to renovate the home into two affordable apartments.

“We obviously have a lot to do here, but the first step is to see where the lead is and where it isn’t,” said Graham, executive director of HOPE Inc., as she watched Baldwin unpack and calibrate the gun. “Everything’s going to be gutted.”

Test results would be used to design a lead-remediation plan, a requirement of the federal grant administered by the city that HOPE will tap for the project.

Baldwin began the inspection by wiping surfaces with a specially treated cloth that absorbs dust, then placed the wipes in a vial so they could be sent to a lab for analysis. She hung a radon detector that would be retrieved a couple of days later, when she would also collect a soil sample from the small yard. Most of her visit, though, was spent training the gun on painted surfaces throughout the first and second floors of the home.

While much attention has been paid recently to lead in drinking water in Flint, Mich., the main source of lead contamination in home environments is lead paint, which was used widely until it was banned in 1978.

“A lot of people think children become poisoned just from eating paint chips, but children actually become poisoned just from breathing the paint dust itself,” Baldwin said. Ingesting lead paint is also a main cause, she added.

Each year, there are two or three children in Ledge Light’s five-town region poisoned by lead paint, said Ryan McCammon, supervisor of environmental health for the public health agency. The poisoning is typically detected during the required blood lead tests pediatricians conduct on 1- to 3-year-olds.

Whenever a child under 6 is poisoned by lead, the health district inspects the home and other properties where the child spends time and requires preparation of an abatement plan by experts, among other actions, McCammon said. But preventive inspections like the one on Wednesday are a much wiser course of action to eliminate the possibility of harming children with this toxic heavy metal in the first place.

“Lead is so bad. It doesn’t take much if you’re a child,” said Mary-Margaret Gaudio, associate extension educator of the Healthy Homes for Children Initiative run by the University of Connecticut Extension Center in Hartford. The initiative provides education about lead poisoning prevention.

She noted that one of the most important messages her group tries to convey is to homeowners fixing up old houses. Without taking proper precautions to remove lead paint safely, a do-it-yourself project can end up causing a disaster.

“It’s a tragedy,” she said. “Someone very innocently has an older home and does the renovations themselves and gets dust into the air, and they end up poisoning themselves and their children.”

A child is considered at a “level of concern” for lead poisoning if testing detects just five micrograms per deciliter of lead in their blood. Children with a single blood test of 20 micrograms per deciliter or two tests of 15 to 19 micrograms per deciliter, taken 90 days apart, are considered “lead poisoned,” McCammon said.

According to the World Health Organization, no known level of exposure to lead is considered safe. And lead poisoning, the WHO notes, “is entirely preventable.”

Lead accumulates in the body, affecting the brain, kidneys and bones. It is stored in the teeth and bones. Young children are especially vulnerable to developmental, intellectual and nervous system dysfunction that can be permanent, according to the WHO. In adults, lead exposure increases the risk of high blood pressure and kidney damage. Pregnant women exposed to lead have a higher risk of miscarriage and giving birth to babies with birth defects.

'A serious concern'

Ronald Kraatz, senior manager of the Healthy Homes Program at the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, said half the homes in Connecticut contain lead-based paint.

“Most of our housing was built when lead paint was used. There’s lots of lead paint, particularly in homes built before 1950,” he said. “We’ve discovered that even very, very low levels of lead are toxic to kids.”

Statewide, he said, about 3 percent of children in the state have tested positive for lead poisoning at some time in their lives. Annually, there are about 2,000 new cases each year, he said. Just last month, two children in Norwich were found to have lead poisoning from exposure to lead paint in their homes.

“It remains a serious concern,” he said. “Even very short-term exposure for a month can cause a child’s blood lead level to spike.”

The impacts, he noted, are both short- and long-term, because lead gets stored in the bones.

Over the last dozen years, he said, about $35 million in federal funds have been spent on lead abatement projects in Connecticut, but there are still many more houses in need.

“The demand is very large, because the number of houses built before 1950 is large,” Kraatz said. While lead was banned from household paint in 1978, he noted, manufacturers began phasing it out through the 1950s and 1960s, so surfaces painted in those decades tend to have much lower lead levels than those painted earlier.

At the Belden Street house, Baldwin tested several main walls of the living room and kitchen areas before the gun detected any lead paint. It was on the stairway and stair stringers leading to the second floor, inside a closet and bathroom and on a door and doorjamb.

"It's measured in milligrams per square centimeter," she said. "Anything higher than 1 is considered positive. We got readings of 2 on the stair stringer, 6.7 on the doorjamb in the closet, and 9.1 on the door casing on the closet. That means it's nine times over the acceptable level."

j.benson@theday.com