Getting the Lead Out: We Can Reduce Our Toxic Burden
by David S. Martin, CNN, May 13, 2010
As a young doctor with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Philip Landrigan’s job was to chase down epidemics. He’d gone after measles in the Southwest and smallpox in Nigeria.
Then the CDC sent him to Texas for a lead poisoning epidemic.
“I was told to find out what was the cause of the epidemic and to solve it,” Landrigan recalled.
When Landrigan and CDC colleague Dr. Stephen H. Gehlbach arrived in El Paso in 1970, they agreed the prime suspect was a local smelter, which had emitted 1,000 tons of lead into the atmosphere in the previous three years. A smelter extracts metal from its ore through heating and melting.
So the two young doctors got a map, drew three concentric circles centered on the smelter and started taking blood from children in each of the areas. As they suspected, the children closest to the smelter had the highest blood-lead levels; the children farthest away, the lowest.
“There really was a bulls-eye distribution of lead poisoning in El Paso with the epicenter right at the smelter,” Landrigan said.
What they found next contributed to new medical thinking about exposure to toxic chemicals — and helped spur bans on lead-based paint and leaded gasoline.
At the time, poisoning was thought to be all or nothing. If you weren’t showing symptoms like vomiting, muscle weakness or convulsions, you were fine. But Landrigan and the CDC team found that even children in the outer circle of their map were profoundly affected by lead exposure.
“At lower levels of exposures, it still caused loss of intelligence, disruptive behavior, a whole spectrum of damage to the brain and nervous system,” Landrigan said. [Read rest of story]