This is a older but still compelling piece written by John Pekkanen, an excellent investigative journalist.
Why Is Lead Still Poisoning Our Children?
Lead is gone from gasoline and paint—with surprisingly beneficial results. But lead still poses dangers to kids, particularly in older neighborhoods. In DC, hundreds of children are being damaged every year—and the results will be more school dropouts and By John Pekkanen
Jonathan Harrison is eight years old and has no friends. He struggles to read and do basic arithmetic.
"No one likes me," he tells his mother. "I just want to die."
...One day Jonathan set his mother's bed on fire.
"I knew Jonathan did not act in any way like my other children or like any child I ever knew," says Royster. "He was getting more and more uncontrollable, and there didn't seem to be anything anyone could do to stop it."
Jonathan's story and variations of it occur too often in this country. Every year in Washington, hundreds of children are harmed by lead poisoning. Nationwide, 310,000 children under age five are lead-poisoned each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); the World Health Organization reports that up to 18 million are harmed worldwide.
What is remarkable about lead poisoning is how destructive it has been to children and society over many decades yet how slowly we are working to eliminate it.
This disconnect persists despite scientific evidence of lead's harm that goes back centuries and is as convincing as that linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer. Lead is a powerful neurotoxin. From the turn of the 20th century to the 1970s, thousands of children died from acute lead poisoning, many misdiagnosed with TB or other illnesses. Although a child died of lead poisoning in Minneapolis this spring, lead now seldom kills children; it only damages their brains, and the damage is irreversible. Scores of studies link childhood lead exposure to diminished intelligence, school failure, behavioral disorders, violence, and criminality.
Lead exposure offers a largely unexamined explanation for some of what continues to go wrong in this country.
"Lead's impact on public health and social functioning is such that I think in a hundred years we will look back on the 20th century and recognize that lead, tobacco, and air pollution were the choleras and typhoids of this century," says Dr. Bruce Lanphear, one of the country's top lead researchers.
Carl Shy, professor emeritus of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina, told the World Health Organization: "The mining and production of lead and lead products is the mistake of the 20th century."
Some people assume that lead poisoning went away with the total ban on leaded gas in 1995, 23 years after its phaseout began and almost 50 years after lead was first added to gasoline as an antiknock agent. National health surveys in the 1970s had revealed high lead levels among children and adults but showed a 75-percent decrease by 1991. As the tide of childhood lead-poisoning ebbed, there were declarations of victory; a 1995 Atlantic Monthly article hailed America's "triumph over lead."
But lead poisoning remains the most significant environmental-health disease of children; it is especially prevalent among inner-city kids. Even though environmental lead levels caused by gasoline have dropped, lead poisoning is a pressing issue now because we've discovered much more about its capacity for human harm.
Children from all levels of society are at risk of lead poisoning, but those at the bottom, who are more apt to live in older, poorly maintained housing, are most often harmed. African-American children have 2½ times the risk of white children, and Latino children about 1½ times the risk, according to the CDC. Ellen Silbergeld, professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, refers to this as the "ghettoization" of lead poisoning.
In DC, as in other cities, some children grow up in lead traps. They may drink lead-contaminated water from their taps. They play in, and sometimes eat, lead-contaminated soil in their yards and playgrounds, a decades-old legacy from leaded-gasoline automobile exhaust and lead paint. They inhale lead-paint dust and eat lead-paint chips in their homes. Children living near waste sites breathe lead particles from the burning of batteries, computers, and other leaded products.
Lead can harm children before birth: It leaches from the bones of expectant mothers exposed during their own childhoods and crosses the placental barrier to enter the fetal brain. The May 2006 issue of Environmental Health Perspectives confirmed earlier findings that very low lead exposure during gestation may cause "lasting and possibly permanent effects" on a child's cognitive development.
The toxic legacy of early lead exposure extends into adulthood. Analyzing census and health-survey data on more than 20,000 Americans, Silbergeld at Hopkins and Mark Lustberg of the University of Maryland reported in 2002 in Archives of Internal Medicine that more than 29 million adult Americans may be at increased risk of premature death because of lead exposure in the 1970s, before the use of leaded gas began to drop. The authors found that premature mortality occurred at lead levels above the current CDC action level of 10 mcg/dl and rose sharply as the levels went higher. When childhood lead levels reached 30 mcg/dl, adult cancer deaths increased 68 percent.
Early lead exposure is also linked to vascular and kidney disease, hypertension, Alzheimer's disease, stroke, and diabetes.
Please read on at:
http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/health/why-is-lead-still-poisoning-our-children/
Suggested by
David F. Goldsmith, PhD www.OccupationalEpi.com
