Unseen lead hazards right in front of your nose

Recent massive recalls of lead-contaminated toys have been a direct result of the intensive public health effort to eliminate lead poisoning.

And yet, children in 25% of U.S. homes are still exposed to lead-based paint hazards.

The culprit? Your own house, especially those built before 1940, and even 40% of those houses built from 1940 to 1959, and 11% of those built from 1960 to 1977.

The major sources of lead exposure in and around houses include lead-contaminated dust, deteriorated lead-based paints, lead-contaminated soil.

This Baltimore child (pictured right) was diagnosed with lead poisoning after his mom noticed him becoming clumsy, irritable and high-strung. Lead came from paint dust created by opening and closing the home’s windows. The level of lead in the child’s blood? 33 ug/dL, way above the 10 ug/dL threshhold considered to bring harmful effects.

Since the US government banned lead in 1979, the percentage of children with high levels of lead in their blood has plummeted from 88% in the 1970s to 1.6% in 2005. Even so, 25% of children still live in houses with lead paint, and lead harms 310,000 of these children.

One such solution that researchers are coming up with is a plan to replace ALL the old, original, lead-painted windows in houses build before 1960. Impossible? Not likely, but it will take many levels of government -federal and local – to clean lead out of our houses.

“It’s a no-brainer,” says Ruth Ann Norton of the Baltimore-based Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning, which since 2000 has been pushing for a sweeping window-replacement program. “It can be the difference between sending (children) to the hospital or sending them to college.”

source: USAToday

Tags: lead, hazard, paint, winwows, poisoning, old houses