GETTING THE LEAD OUT
Harris, Michael
Getting the lead out The energy crisis compounds a threat to public health Michael Harris Anew controversy is brewing over an age-old pollution and public health problem: lead poisoning. Both in...
...During a recent study at Harvard Medical School, however, Dr...
...Herbert Needleman examined 2,335 first and second-grade children from white working-class neighborhoods in Boston, and found children with elevated but "low-level" quantities of lead in their blood, apparently from airborne sources...
...Both in Washington and in state air-pollution control agencies around the country, officials are developing new programs to control airborne lead as they find mounting evidence of lead dangers...
...Mobile sources are handled directly by the Federal Government, and at this point, that means lead in gasoline...
...Right now, Federal energy officials are looking the other way...
...The team unearthed bones of Peruvians buried some 1,600 years ago in arid deserts in the Viru Valley on Peru's northwest coast...
...Many states have yet to complete development of the standardized lead monitoring procedures mandated by the EPA...
...In state capitals around the country, air pollution officials are waiting for the Federal Government to act...
...In fact, the Department of Energy has advocated a further relaxation of restrictions on the use of leaded gas as one response to the energy crisis...
...Most of the lead in the air today is produced by the combustion of leaded gasoline...
...The danger of lead poisoning has long been known, but recent efforts to control it have usually been limited to the initiatives taken by local activist groups...
...For years, this was considered the country's chief lead hazard...
...This may be because the problem was thought to be confined to the impoverished inner cities, where children ate chips of lead-based paint crumbling from walls and windowsills of decaying buildings...
...But the Federal anti-pollution agency found it had a tiger by the tail: At least 98 per cent of the nation's airborne lead comes from that prime American polluter, the automobile...
...Although contamination with man-mined lead began in the northern hemisphere some 4,500 years ago, they said, the Peruvians were isolated from contamination by culture and geography for thousands of years...
...stomach pain to high blood pressure, permanent mental retardation, and premature aging, is a well-documented health problem...
...Gasoline is a crisis commodity these days, and Federal energy officials look askance at anything that would put a wrinkle in the supply system — even something as urgent as curbing widespread lead poisoning...
...Many public health researchers say stricter limits on lead in the air are needed to protect the public's health — but so far they are fighting a losing battle against the nation's growing energy demands...
...Jonathan E. Ericson after the study, "it is extremely important for us to reevaluate now the critical levels of lead permissible in our society...
...However, recent tests have disclosed elevated lead levels in the bloodstreams of children never exposed to lead-based paints...
...Exposure to airborne lead in one quantity or another has afflicted human populations for thousands of years as a result of mining, smelting, and other industrial applications...
...Last year, EPA directed states to develop standardized monitoring procedures to check levels of lead in the air, and to initiate control programs if the levels were above accepted standards...
...And President Carter has ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to delay for at least a year the implementation of the standard that would lower the amount of permissible lead in gasoline...
...The research team analyzed the bones and teeth of the ancient Peruvians, and came up with a startling find: The amount of naturally occurring lead these ancient Indians ingested in their food, water, and air under strictly natural conditions was only one-five-hundredth of the amount of lead ingested by the average American today...
...Researchers are concluding that lead is being concentrated in the body from particles in the air...
...Acute lead poisoning, with symptoms ranging from headaches and Michael Harris, a New Hampshire free-lance writer, wrote "The War Against the Eastern Coyote" in the September issue...
...The toll that lifelong low-level lead poisoning may have already exacted on the health and mental development of the nation's citizenry will never be known...
...Airborne lead has long been viewed as a pollution problem, of course, but the full magnitude of the threat it poses to public health is just beginning to be understood...
...The children affected were frequently disorganized, distracted, hyperactive, impulsive, and easily frustrated...
...The Environmental Protection Agency agrees...
...In fact, researchers from Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology recently went all the way to Peru to find human remains untainted by human-produced lead...
...Based on what we already know about lead poisoning and its effect on neurological functions," noted Dr...
...As one state air pollution control official noted recently, "In urban areas, automobiles are the problem...
...The EPA then proposed even more stringent airborne lead standards, originally scheduled to go into effect this year...
Vol. 43 • October 1979 • No. 10
