Lead in the Inner Cities by Howard Mielke
1. Introduction / 2. Sources of Lead / 3. Health Consequences / 4. Re-evaluations / 5. Children at Risk / 6. Prevention
3. Health Consequences [300 words]
Lead poisoning was known in colonial times and has roots in antiquity. Clinical symptoms of lead poisoning were observed in the work force of trades that handled lead. Benjamin Franklin noticed in 1786 that some of his lead type -setters at the print shop suffered from a debilitating weakness of the hands called dropsy. He observed that those workers who suffered from dropsy failed to wash their hands before eating their sandwiches, and attributed the disease to their slovenly and unclean habits. When he learned of a 60-year-old report noting similar health problems, he commented, “and you will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known and exist before it is generally received and practiced on.”
The clinical problems of lead poisoning were described by the Greeks and were so prevalent during Roman times that some attribute the fall of Rome to lead poisoning of the aristocracy. It was considered a scourge (Saturnine poisoning) in Europe in the Middle Ages, when people frequently sweetened sour wine with lead acetate.
In other words, lead poisoning is not new, but because of the industrial way of life the poisoning has shifted to children, and the number of its victims has skyrocketed. Consider the magnitude of the man-made products that use and release lead into global environmental circulation. Jerome Nriagu of the University of Michigan School of Public Health estimates the total amount of lead produced from mines to be about 260 million metric tons in the past 3,000 years. And all of this mining has left its imprint in the geological record. Lead is found trapped in datable layers of the glaciers of Greenland, peat-bog cores of Switzerland and sediment cores of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Although this geochemical perspective provides a framework for the history of the global quantity of mining and environmental emissions over three millennia, it does not assist us in appreciating the nature and degree of the local insult that lead has had on our urbanized society. The impact -- particularly on children was not fully appreciated until the past few decades.
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