Lead:

Lead is carcinogenic and can cause cancer

This easily-worked metal has been used for pipes, pewter and paint since Roman times. It has also been used in lead glazes for pottery and, in this century, as an additive to raise the octane level of gasoline. All these uses have now either been banned, replaced or discouraged as lead is known to be detrimental to health, particularly that of children. Daily intake of lead from all sources is about one tenth of a milligram, and the average human body stores about 120 milligrams in the bones. Lead is still widely used for cable sheathing, car batteries, lead crystal glass, radiation protection and in some solders.

In the United States, we have been fast to build overlapping, redundant, reactive, and non-integrated health systems, but slow to advance the cause of health in a reliable and verifiably equitable way. Lead poisoning is an excellent case that well illustrates this point.

Large portions of the U.S. population benefited from new regulations that banned lead paint and progressively decreased the amount of lead in our gasoline. In 1970, 88 percent of all U.S. children under age 6 had blood lead levels above 10 micrograms per deciliter. By 1991, only 5 percent. Even so, significant numbers of children are still affected. A study from 1999 to 2001 found that 430,000 kids, or 2.2 percent of under age 6 population had lead poisoning. The numbers were higher among poor kids with rates topping 6 percent in one Medicaid study. Also, lack of proper follow-up post-diagnosis is extremely common. A study published this year found that out of about 3,600 Medicaid-enrolled children in Michigan with lead poisoning, 46 percent did not receive appropriate follow-up testing.

My point is not to simply run on about lead poisoning, which in its own right needs careful attention. Certainly, if you’re the parent of a preschooler in an urban environment, you need to have your child tested, and if the test is positive, make sure appropriate follow-up occurs. Your involvement protects your child and helps clinicians retool systems and processes that are too often error-prone.

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For more information regarding lead: Click Here.