The real facts about children and lead poisoning, on Babble.com.
Official advice about lead poisoning is either too scary or not scary enough
My daughter’s one-year routine lead screening had returned a blood-lead level of 18 micrograms/deciliter, which our doctor called “borderline high,” by which she meant it wasn’t high enough to call for medical treatment.
When I recounted this assessment to my county lead specialist the next morning, he responded witheringly: “That’s not borderline, that’s high. That’s lead poisoning.”
The guilt was blinding. I felt like a stereotypical stupid hippie for every second I’d spent researching vaccine safety or making my own organic baby food instead of mopping my floors. “Entirely preventable” is the slogan of the lead-poisoning prevention world. It’s meant to be hopeful, but it felt like a scolding. “This is so simple,” it seemed
DO proactively test your home and other places your kid goes. Follow your gut and be assertive. If you hire inspectors, make them take dust wipes from the areas you’re worried about, not just where they think is good idea.
DON’T lose perspective. One drink of wine at Christmas from a lead crystal glass is not going to make you lead poisoned.
DO pass on what you know about your home and how you’ve addressed the hazards to new residents or owners. While your real estate agent or landlord will resist, it’s not only the law and the right thing to do, but as Leann Howell found, most buyers will actually appreciate the detailed information over an routine “unaware of lead hazards” statement that they suspect is a lie.
continued on the next pageto say. “How could you have messed up so badly?”
Once I came up for air from my frenzied cleaning and began trying to reconcile the various results of my research, however, I started to suspect it wasn’t exactly so simple. If it was a simple matter of old paint, how come the kids of my friends with houses in similar conditions hadn’t tested high? Why was no one sure if I was supposed to be abating or just washing her hands more?
Nearly everyone is on board with the most major shift in lead-safety messages over the past couple decades: The problem is no longer seen as mostly paint chips and kids “gnawing on window sills.” Lead dust from deteriorating paint, we now know, is actually the primary way kids get exposed.
Beyond that point of agreement, however, the priorities get a little jumbled. Public health messages have it hard: they need to be scary enough that people take threats seriously, but not so overboard that people either tune them out or get despondent and give up. Many people who try to get the full scoop on lead are getting not so much a balance as a mix of both extremes.
Here are some of the messages I repeatedly encountered, some from official pamphlets or spokespeople, some in conventional wisdom or online message boards, some explicit, some implied, all based on a lot of truth but missing a few crucial pieces.
“To deal with lead you either have to clean like a madwoman every day for the rest of your life or spend thousands completely tearing your house apart and putting it back together.” Verdict: too scary, plus a waste of resources.
When I went to learn about my city’s lead abatement assistance program, I was told that the one and only option was to rip out all windows, doors, or molding and sheetrock over any walls that had lead anywhere on them. Not wanting to destroy my 100-year-old house, and suspecting this wasn’t the only way, I demurred.
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About the Author
Miriam Axel-Lute is a freelance writer, editor and poet. She is an award-winning columnist for Metroland, and lives in Albany with her two partners and daughter. Her website is mjoy.org.
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6 thoughts on “The real facts about children and lead poisoning, on Babble.com.”
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Thank you for this piece. We rent an apartment in an old building, and our manager dismissed us as pretty much crazy when upon moving in we requested that a county lead inspector come in for a lead inspection since we had an eleven-month old (luckily, such inspections are free in our county when there is a baby in the house). Like you, I got overwhelmed by all of the information out there when I first started doing research, and I wish your article had been available to me. Well-done.
Even more interesting is the story of how you came to have two partners.
Check back in late October for that essay, Tinkers! – Ada
Our son was diagnosed also at one year with a lead level of 21 and severe anemia. As you say the guilt was intense. I had really tried my hardest to do everything “right”– strictly breastfed, organic everything. Indeed. I was even grinding my own brown rice to make rice cereal, rather than using tht nasty gerber’s. Well, it turned out that the Gerber’s would have been a lot better, because it would have given him IRON. He was a preemie, and at higher risk for anemia, but somehow the lame doctors did not tell me this. Anyway, the anemia and the lead are interconnected because the iron in the blood sort of holds the lead at bay, and if there’s not enough iron there, the lead can completely take over. Well, it sucked. Three years of hard core iron supplements, every day. Now he’s fine, except for the fact that his teeth are totally a mess, and apparently his enamel was malformed because of the lead sucking up all the calcium or something like that. He’s almost five now, normal hemoglobin and lead all gone, but has had root canal, which was pure hell.And several cavities filled also. We wait in suspense to see about his permanent teeth. Where did he get the lead? We lived in an old house but were insanely careful… the city of Cleveland came out to test everything in sight and there was no lead dust, not lead paint, etc., etc. It was a set of antique chairs that he chewed on– just once or twice! And then I varnished them all like crazy. Just when he was about 8-10 months old and in peak anemia and teething and crawling. We now have a one-year-old teething and crawling and have learned from our mistakes: daily Floridex with iron, and the chairs have been sent away until further notice.
We also purchased a old house and live in a one that was even older when our child was a newborn. We did have cracking paint in the one bathroom that I suspected was lead paint, but we never became very concerned about it. A relative who is a structural engineer told us that lead paint is ok, as long as it’s been covered up by new paint with in the past few years (almost every rental property is repainted every time a new person moves in) and luckily for us most of the floors, walls and bathroom fixtures were new.
This should be more widely distributed! I know majority of this info I did find through my own research, but you have to read through so many sources that mainly say the same thing. The doctor’s office gives out the advice to keep their hands clean and have them eat healthy. Thanks. I never would have done those things otherwise. I wish you had info on lead damage itself though-particularly with children who show no signs of damage at all but still have high lead levels? All 4 of my kids have had high lead levels but all have normal/above average verbal skills and no abnormal problems. We never discovered a source, I assume it’s the house itself. But we don’t have money to pay for someone to come test things and since we rent a house, any notice from the city goes to our landlords not us. The doctors always say, someone from the city will contact you about a home inspection, but they never do. (I’ve mentioned this to doctors and people from the insurance company also with no results)I’m not overly worried about it as they seem perfectly fine, but it would be nice to know for sure weather there is anything to watch for or worry about. Anybody know if there are any studies done on kids with elevated lead levels and how they turned out?PS. to Cleveland, the iron in those baby cereals is very poorly absorbed by the body, so it probably wouldn’t have helped.