Lead Poisoning in the Modern Community by Mena Moran
Lead Poisoning in the Modern Community by Mena Moran
Lead Poisoning Background
Throughout the centuries and recent decades, lead has been utilized for paint, gas, sheet lead, solder, pipes, and ammunition. While these materials have been used regularly, lead is exceedingly toxic, and symptoms to the body and the brain can be detrimental, leading to convulsions, comas, kidney failure, reproductive issues, nervous system disruptions, anemia, cancer, and death. Neurologically, lead is known to slow growth and development and contribute to neurological disorders in adulthood (i.e. depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and the lowering of IQ). The measure of lead in the blood (blood lead levels or BLLs), have been high due to this overuse of lead—the average BLL decreasing from 15 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood (µ/dL) in the 1970s to 5 µ/dL in the 1990s (“Lead Management”, 2011). Because lead is harmful to development, the toxin especially impacts children.
In the city of Flint, Michigan, beginning in 2014, 100,000 people were affected by lead poisoning before officials took action. As a low-income city, the governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, began to draw water from the Flint River to conserve money in 2013. For many years, the Flint River was known to be toxic and rich in pollutants, and when the river began to supply Flint’s water, elected officials ruled that the water need not undergo treatment. As if this weren’t contaminated enough, lead pipes were used to further distribute the water, and “[d]ue to the water’s poor quality, lead began to seep from the pipes into the city’s water supply” (“Flint Water Crisis”, 2022). In the crisis, clean water was not available until 2019, and many citizens acquired Legionnaires Disease (a form of pneumonia developed by Legionella bacteria), among other mental and physical health tolls, such as rashes and hair loss—there were a total of twelve deaths accounted for. Around this time, the African American population of the city was 57% in 2015 (Sim, 2016). In 2021, a lawsuit was initiated against Michigan, Flint, and officials for duty negligence in the crisis. Similarly, in Wisconsin, in 2018, one quarter of children were tested for lead poisoning, all under the age of six, and accordingly had BLLs “over double the national average” (Shain, 2022). In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, over 40 percent of the water lines contain lead, and half of the city’s households are rented, limiting residents’ choices in the matter of replacement. Costs for replacing lead pipes in Milwaukee have ranged up to $5,000 for just one pipe to $27,000 for a minimal replacement. The CDC claims that no lead level is considered safe, and although this is the goal set by the EPA, the maximum amount of lead permitted in water is 15 parts per billion.
Lead and Schools
A Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) study in 2003 “found that 28 percent of licensed childcare centers in the U.S. contain lead-based paint” (“Lead Management”,