Why Won't Toxic Lead Just Go Away?

So today we learn that lead is in lipstick. In recent months we've read about lead in children's toys, lunchboxes, contaminated candy, children's costume jewelry, and many other common products in our homes. Will it ever end?

Since the days of the Pharaohs, physicians have known that lead is a dangerous metal. Lead poisoning is described in the oldest medical textbooks. Yet this stuff just never seems to go away. Getting rid of toxic lead is kind of like killing the many-headed Hydra. Many of us working in the area of environmental health feel like we've spent a large part of our career clubbing the heads of this monster. I'm proud that I had a role in helping to virtually eliminate lead from calcium supplements, antacids, water faucets, and water meters. Every little bit helps...

One of my heroes is Dr. Alice Hamilton, the founder of Industrial Medicine and the first woman professor at Harvard medical school (she joined the faculty in 1919). In the 1920's, Dr. Hamilton campaigned against the addition of lead to gasoline. She argued that the toxic effects of high-dose lead were well-known, and that the dispersion of lead throughout the environment was a really bad idea. Of course, history has proven her right in spades, but at the time her concerns were dismissed as completely overblown and hysterical.

It took decades of painstaking scientific research to prove what we now know definitively - that extremely low levels of lead are dangerous to health, especially to the normal neurological development of children. Worse still, there's no 'threshold' to the noxious effect of lead, so any dose is adverse, no matter how small. It took more than 50 years to finally ban lead from gasoline, paint, water pipes, and the solder in food cans.

For public health providers, it is gratifying that the average lead levels in children's blood have fallen dramatically over the past 30 years since the ban on lead in gasoline. When I was a child, the average blood lead level was about 17 micrograms per decileter. Now a child with a lead level that high would be clearly diagnosed as lead poisoned, and the average blood level in children is around 2. The figure (courtesy of the EPA) at the bottom of this page shows how children's blood lead levels dropped in parallel with the phase-out of lead in gasoline. The economic benefits to society from this decline have been estimated at $319 billion, and the health benefits for countless people are unquantifiable.

Yet here we are today, with all the scientific knowledge in the world about the awful health and economic toll from lead poisoning, and we're still finding lead in consumer products on an almost daily basis. I have to say, it turns my stomach. The problem here is not a lack of scientific evidence, and it's not a lack of education. The problem is a lack of regulatory oversight and enforcement dedicated to protecting the health of consumers.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) were created in order to protect us from dangerous chemicals, and from hazardous products. If they can't even protect us from lead, what exactly are they doing? There's an effort afoot right now in Congress to reform the CPSC, and it's long-overdue. These agencies need the legal mandate, the staff, and the sheer will-power to stand up to the polluters who want to cut corners at the consumer's expense.

If you want some basic ideas about protecting your children from lead poisoning, check out this resource. To learn more about current efforts to reform the CPSC, check out this blog post and this article.