New York Downstate Medical Center. During his lifetime, a severely retarded individual can cost health agencies $250,000 in special training and custodial care, Merenstein said." The horror of it is that lead poisoning is a completely preventable disease.... When we used to have ten polio cases, the whole city rose up in arms, but when 30,000 kids are affected with lead poisoning, nobody notices." The long-term solution to the problem is to remove the old leaded paint or to replace the houses. But paint removal is often expensive and, when done at all, often does not include removal from the ceiling or upper walls, social workers say. In New York, several rent strikes have been organized after a leadpoisoning incident." Since the City is not about to enforce the rules, the citizens have to take it upon themselves," said Wendel 0. Richel, coordi-nator of a lead-detection project near New York. Such rent strikes can be particularly successful, Richel said, because" a landlord can always accuse the tenant of putting a hole in a wall, but he can't accuse him of putting lead in a building." As a stop-gap measure, several com-munities have launched screening programs to detect lead early in young ghetto children. In Chicago, the City Board of Health has screened over 100,000 children since 1966. Henrietta Sachs, director of the lead-poisoning clinic, said that the number of high lead levels detected had dropped by roughly a half during each year of the program, and that the cases de-tected were less severe than might ordinarily have been expected before the screening program. By contrast, the New York City Health Department tested blood samples from only 5,000 children last year, and these werere-ferrals from city hospitals andclinics, and not children tested as a result of an extensive neighborhood screening program. Community health groups have complained that the city was mov-ing too slowly in establishing a screen-ing program, especially after the city postponed a decision ona biochemical supply company's offer of 50,000 free lead testing kits until late in August, when the optimum testing season was closing. Felicia Oliver-Smith, director of the city's lead-poisoning program, explained that the city had doubts