Health/Toxics: Lead

Since ancient times, lead has been fashioned into pipes, paints, eating utensils, cosmetics, spermicide and, more recently, ammunition, batteries, ceramics, solder and fuel additives. The Romans knew that high doses of the heavy, malleable blue-gray metal caused madness and death and relegated lead mining to far provinces. Yet they continued to use lead cups, plates and armor, unaware of the debilitating effects of chronic exposure to small amounts of lead.

The insidious symptoms of slow lead poisoning -- impaired intellect, memory loss, mood swings, infertility, nerve, joint and muscle disorders, cardiovascular, skeletal, kidney and renal problems and possibly cancer -- were not fully recognized until the late 20th century. In 1973, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began phasing out leaded gasoline, a process that was to drag on until 1996. Lead was banned in household paint in 1978. As a result, according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, lead levels in the blood of American children have dropped by 86 percent since the late 1970s.

Still, research by the Environmental Working Group has continued to uncover lead hazards, especially to the most vulnerable members of society. In 2000, an EWG analysis found that about 212,000 one-to-five-year-olds in California had harmful blood lead levels between 1992 and1998, but the state had identified only 14, 900 of those children. A 2004 EWG study in Ohio found that 19,000 under age six had unsafe levels of lead in their blood. Less than one-third of them had been reported to state health authorities, primarily because they had not been tested.

EWG's Human Toxome Project, initiated in late 2006 in collaboration with Commonweal, a California health and environmental research group and aimed at mapping toxins in various populations, found lead in all 56 individuals tested by EWG/Commonweal and 13,641 of the 14,333 people tested in CDC biomonitoring studies. Scientific testing and analysis under the Toxome Project is continuing, with a goal of mapping human body burdens globally.

Meanwhile, EWG is pressing for passage of the federal Kid-Safe Chemicals Act, introduced in 2008 in an effort to strengthen the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 and protect Americans, especially children, from industrial chemicals like lead that contaminate air, water, food and living spaces.