“Already at the young age of 30, their fragility parameters are worse than someone 47 years of age,” he said. Currently, Bhattacharya is finding early bone fragility in women that is associated with lead exposure. The more they look, the more researchers discover lead’s reach. Lead can travel across the blood-brain barrier, he explained: It can go anywhere it wants. The lead took it away,” Bhattacharya said. “They didn’t have the neurons in the brain that should allow them to maintain balance. Another researcher, Kim Cecil, shed light on the possible pathway, Battacharya said.
Found early, some problems with balance and motion may be treatable. He and a team found a way to detect lead-induced impairments with a quick, non-invasive test that can be administered starting at age five. That’s been the focus of Battacharya’s work. Less widely known than lead’s learning effects on the brain are the ways that it affects balance in both kids and adults. From first grade to 11th.” Tony was one of 300 people from Cincinnati taking part in the longest running study in the world of people who were exposed to lead in the womb. “It was always a concentration thing with me,” a 22-year-old named Tony told the national radio program Living on Earth in 2003. You have to see a letter, which is a symbol, put it together with other symbols, connect that to a pronunciation, connect that to an object or an activity.”Ĭhildren who have been exposed to lead take a blow to these processes that can amount to 10 IQ points. “When you are trying to read, there are several places that are trying to be integrated. Mary Jean Brown, on the teaching faculty at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, described the act of reading and the growing understanding of lead’s potential assault on it. “The motor, cognitive, hepatic, kidney, visual systems, anything you think of, it can destroy it.” Lead impacts nearly every physiological domain in the human body, said Amit Bhattacharya, a professor of environmental health at the University of Cincinnati. The science of adverse health effects accumulatesĮvidence of lead’s harm mounted after the bans. In the United States and Germany, the final phase-out of leaded fuel came in 1996, a quarter century ago. Austria, Canada, Slovakia, Denmark, and Sweden followed.
Japan was first to ban leaded gas in 1980. Gasoline coated the world in lead.īy the early 1970s, researchers were certain enough of lead’s health effects to take their results to the newly created U.S. The leaded product was highly promoted and popular, even though there were cleaner alternatives- based on alcohol, for example.Īll the lead that went into gas tanks globally-three grams in each gallon-came out the exhaust pipe as particles that lingered in the air before settling on surfaces. But why did this take so long, when the understanding of lead as a health hazard goes back more than a century?Ĭompanies began creating lead additives in 1921 to fix knocking or pinging in engines that could damage them and waste gasoline. “It is a big day,” said Jane Akumu, lead Africa program officer for sustainable mobility at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).Īkumu is one of a cadre of international transportation and children’s health experts who have focused for decades on the issue of lead in fuel and paint.įor the past 19 years, country-by-country efforts to eradicate leaded fuel have been carried out by the Partnership for Clean Fuels and Vehicles, a group of 73 industry groups, governments, NGOs, and others under the aegis of UNEP. The last country in the world to sell it: Algeria. The last leaded fuel has finally disappeared from gas stations.
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