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More than 30 years after the United States Congress enacted a federal law to eliminate lead paint hazards from American homes, approximately half a million children are still identified with elevated blood lead levels every year. Seember Agbajir, a geoenvironmental scientist from the northern part of Nigeria, is part of a thin line of certified specialists trying to close the gap between what the law requires and what is actually happening on the ground.
Jos, capital of Plateau State, sits on a rocky, elevated plateau in Nigeria’s middle belt. It is a city with a complicated environmental history. For most of the twentieth century, the Plateau was one of the most intensively mined tin regions in the world. The extraction generated considerable wealth for colonial interests and left behind, in the surrounding landscape, abandoned mine workings and contaminated ground that researchers are still assessing decades later. Studies published in recent years have documented elevated concentrations of lead and other heavy metals in soils and agricultural crops near former tin mining sites in Plateau State. This is a legacy that scientists and public health researchers are beginning to measure systematically.
Seember Agbajir, though not born in the Plateau State capital, has lived in Jos and spent her professional life measuring legacies of this kind. Currently, she is at 27, an environmental specialist at EnviroScience Solutions LLC in Orange, New Jersey, working inside a residential lead hazard crisis that has been formally acknowledged for more than three decades and has still not been resolved.
She studied geography and planning at the University of Jos, graduating in 2021 on the Dean’s List with a grade point average of 3.82. The discipline gave her a spatial analytical framework: environmental problems are not simply chemical events occurring in individual locations. They are phenomena with patterns that can be mapped, modelled, and, if the analysis is done rigorously enough, anticipated before the harm occurs. As part of her academic grading, she served her internship in the Ministry of Mines and Steel Development. Here, she collaborated with a team to conduct regular environmental inspections at various lead sites. Due to her passion for further studies, she pursued a master’s degree at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania in the United States, completing a Master of Science in Geoenvironmental Science in 2025 while serving as a Graduate Assistant, conducting independent research applying geographic information systems to environmental health data. In a bid to examine the environmental mining activities in her neighbourhood, she carried out a study on “Investigation on the Relationship Between Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary and Coal Mining Activities in Pennsylvania Counties”.
“While living in Plateau State, you know that the land carries things. The mines shaped it. That history is in the soil. Becoming a scientist was, for me, partly about wanting to understand what I already knew was true, and to develop tools to actually address it.”
Seember Agbajir, Environmental Specialist
What the Law Requires and What Is Missing
The scale of the American residential lead problem is difficult to square with how long the country has officially known about it. Lead was widely incorporated into residential paint until 1978, when the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission prohibited its residential use under the Consumer Product Safety Act. By then, it had been applied, at concentrations now recognised as hazardous, to the walls, windowsills, and doors of tens of millions of buildings across the country. As those surfaces age and deteriorate, lead is released as dust that settles in the interior environment. Young children, whose developing biology makes them uniquely sensitive to its neurological effects, are the primary victims.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates that approximately 24 million homes built before 1978 still contain deteriorated lead-based paint in hazardous condition, and that millions of those homes are occupied by families with young children. The U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has determined that there is no safe blood lead level in children, that even low-level exposure impairs cognitive development and reduces measured intelligence, and that the neurological damage is permanent. The CDC estimates that approximately 500,000 children in the United States currently have blood lead levels at or above its reference value.
In 1992, Congress enacted the Residential Lead-Based Paint Hazard Reduction Act, Title X of Public Law 102 550, establishing a national legal framework to eliminate these hazards. The law directs the Environmental Protection Agency and HUD to set hazard standards, certify practitioners, fund remediation in low-income housing, and mandate disclosure of lead hazards in residential property transactions. More than thirty years later, the annual toll of children with elevated blood lead levels has remained stubbornly persistent. The mandate is on the books. The workforce trained to execute it at the ground level has never been built to the scale the problem requires.
Olga Victorie/MSF
“Nigeria experienced one of the worst lead poisoning disasters in recorded history in Zamfara State in 2010, linked to artisanal gold mining. America’s problem is different in kind but similar in structure: a toxic metal, a regulatory failure to fully eliminate it, and communities that continue to bear the consequences.”
Seember Agbajir
Building the Map
Property-by-property inspection, essential as it is, works one building at a time. Ms Agbajir’s larger project operates at a different scale. Alongside her professional practice, she is developing a GIS-integrated geospatial risk model for residential lead exposure across Essex County. The model draws on multiple publicly available data sources: housing age and condition records from municipal property databases; blood lead level surveillance data published annually by the NJ Department of Health, disaggregated by municipality and census tract; federal housing inspection histories; demographic vulnerability indicators; and the field assessment data accumulating from her own professional site work.
The analytical output is a set of prioritised risk maps that identify, at the census tract level, where the intersection of older deteriorating housing and documented childhood lead exposure is most acute, and where remediation resources will deliver the greatest public health return. The maps are designed to function as planning tools for municipal health departments, community development organisations, and federally funded lead reduction programmes, serving as evidence-based instruments for directing limited resources toward the highest risk communities.
The methodology is designed to replicate. The data infrastructure she uses is available in equivalent form for urban housing markets across the northeastern and midwestern United States. A model validated in Essex County can be adapted for Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, or Baltimore. “The data exists almost everywhere,” she says. “What does not yet exist, in most jurisdictions, is someone integrating it into a form that decision makers can actually use. That is the contribution I am trying to make.”
The Nigerian Dimension
Ms. Agbajir is measured about the connection between her background and her work. She does not reduce her career to an origin story. But she is direct about what living in Plateau State gave her as a scientist. “I understood early that environmental contamination is not an abstraction,” she says. “It is something that happens to communities, to families, to children who do not know about what is making them sick. I did not learn that in a classroom. I learned it from the landscape I grew up in and from what it told you about what had happened there.”
Nigeria has its own acute lead crisis. The 2010 outbreak in Zamfara State, in which artisanal gold mining contaminated the soil and homes of entire communities, is documented as one of the worst episodes of childhood lead poisoning in recorded history, killing hundreds of children and affecting thousands more. It was a crisis that demanded exactly the kind of systematic environmental assessment and community-level health intelligence that Ms Agbajir is now developing methodologies to provide. “When I read about Zamfara,” she says, “I think about the data that would have been needed: the contamination maps, the exposure models, the prioritised remediation plans. That is exactly what I am building the capacity to produce.”
The soil contamination documented near former tin mining sites in Plateau State is a different problem, slower and more diffuse, but one that the same analytical tools can address given the right data infrastructure. “The GIS methodology does not care which country it is applied in,” she says. “It needs environmental monitoring data and health surveillance records. Nigeria is building both. The tools are ready when the data is.”
“The commitment was made more than thirty years ago,” she says, of the American federal mandate. “The data is there. The science is settled. The law is clear. What is needed now is the sustained, technical, building-by-building work of actually carrying it out. That is the job. It is not glamorous. It is necessary. And there are not enough people willing to do it.”
