Prevention of Childhood Lead Toxicity

Abstract

Blood lead concentrations have decreased dramatically in US children over the past 4 decades, but too many children still live in housing with deteriorated lead-based paint and are at risk for lead exposure with resulting lead-associated cognitive impairment and behavioral problems. Evidence continues to accrue that commonly encountered blood lead concentrations, even those below 5 µg/dL (50 ppb), impair cognition; there is no identified threshold or safe level of lead in blood. From 2007 to 2010, approximately 2.6% of preschool children in the United States had a blood lead concentration ≥5 µg/dL (≥50 ppb), which represents about 535 000 US children 1 to 5 years of age. Evidence-based guidance is available for managing increased lead exposure in children, and reducing sources of lead in the environment, including lead in housing, soil, water, and consumer products, has been shown to be cost-beneficial. Primary prevention should be the focus of policy on childhood lead toxicity.

A Case Study of Environmental Injustice: The Failure in Flint

“…It damages children’s brains, erodes intelligence, diminishes creativity and the ability to weigh consequences and make good decisions, impairs language skills, shortens attention span, and predisposes to hyperactive and aggressive behavior. Lead exposure in early childhood is linked to later increased risk for dyslexia and school failure.” [11] Other articles and reports have also confirmed these adverse effects [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]. …”

“…There is not. Many authors have weighed in on this question recently [11,12,13,15,17,19,57,58,59,60,61,62], some with very specific plans and ideas. Primary prevention of lead exposure has been particularly emphasized in almost all of them.…”

“…Jacobs and colleagues at the National Center for Healthy Housing have started a campaign for lead exposure detection and lead poisoning prevention based on these three principles: “find it, fix it, and fund it” [33]. Some call for revised standards for lead in air, house dust, soil and water [12,61,62,63]. The chief causes of lead exposure are nicely summarized by Levin and colleagues [64].…”

Biogeochemical characterization of municipal compost to support urban agriculture and limit childhood lead exposure from resuspended urban soils

“…This newly emerging urban lead exposure paradigm significantly alters the landscape of lead exposure prevention programs, placing the emphasis on addressing legacy lead sources in soils rather than leaded paint. The ubiquitous and non-point source nature of this exposure pathway necessitates a focus on primary prevention (Laidlaw et al, 2016;Lanphear et al, 2016;Needlemen 2004;Zhang et al, 2013) and primordial prevention (Leech et al, 2016) as the most viable strategies for reducing blood lead levels (BLLs) in urban children. Since the bioavailable fraction of lead in urban soils ultimately governs its public health burden, effective remediation schemes must reduce exposure to bioavailable lead fractions (Henry et al, 2015).…”

“…Since urban soil is a major source of Pb exposure (Mielke et al, 2016) that is not given the concerted attention required to solve the problem (Laidlaw et al, 2017), creating remediation schemes is an imperative. There is no safe level of exposure to lead (Lanphear et al, 2016), and lead exposure is an environmental justice issue that has both historically caused and currently contributes to racial inequalities (Leech et al, 2016;Sampson and Winter, 2016).…”