The title is meant to be a challenge, not a statement about lead workers.

There are people who are thrill-seekers, who aren’t happy unless they’re pushing the boundaries of safety. The adrenalin junkies.

Most of us have done something stupid in our lives that had the potential to harm or kill us. But most of us have learned that taking due care makes for a longer and healthier life. Some of us never learn.

And then there are lead risk workers. I know the job pays well, at least for people in the mining industry, but do battery manufacturers of recyclers get paid big salaries? I have a blog post about who are lead workers, that’s enough.

Lead does cause neurological problems that can result in less than socially acceptable behaviour, but the real question was meant to ask why anyone would want to subject themselves to the medical dangers associated with lead UNLESS they had some way to protect themselves.

It’s a bit like seatbelts. You don’t have to wear them, and there are rare situations where not having a seatbelt might be an advantage, but having something to stop you smashing your face into the windscreen is pretty attractive if your car hits something at speed.

But the existing “safety” provisions around lead biohazard management DON’T protect workers.

Lead IS dangerous and it accumulates in the body. It accumulates in your bones and while a falling blood level may seem to indicate that the lead is leaving your body, IT ISN’T. Some lead is lost when the red blood cells that bound it are broen down and replaced, but most of the lead that got into your body stays for a long long time, decades

f you’re exposed to more lead because of your job, you’ll accumulate more lead. That’s pretty bad and as far as the lead industry as a whole is concerned, it’s part of the job. If you don’t like being exposed to lead, you can always leave, and take your lead with you.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

At the end of the first world war, Britain developed an arsenic-based poison gas (Lewisite) for use on the battlefield. Poison gas is highly effective, but it does have a small disadvantage if the wind changes and it blows into your own trenches. If you breathed in Lewisite, you promptly suffered from arsenic poisong.

While poison gas was technically cheating the British were sufficient worried about lewisite that an antidote, BAL (British Anti-Lewisite) was developed. BAL could be administered before a battle to provide a degree of immunity to Lewisite, or after exposure to minimise the toxic effects of breathing in Lewisite. BAL provided an antidote or prophylactic against arsenic poisoning and it still used today.

There are a number of compunds that do the same thing for lead. They bind lead (and other heavy metals) and get excreted from the body, removing the lead. They have a generic name, chelator or chelating agent and administering them is called chelation therapy. Depending on the chelator and the lead levels, they can be administered as capsules (oral) or by IV or intramuscular injection (parenteral).

If a lead worker was able to remove any harmful lead they absorbed or ate, it wouldn’t cause any harm. It wouldn’t matter if you worked with lead or not because the risk of suffering from the effects of lead poisoning wouldn’t be there.

There are a few small problems though. Existing workplace health and safety regulations ignore lead accumulation. They assume that once your raised blood lead levels drop, everything is okay. They must also assume that lead workers are special and can tolerate much higher levels of lead than ordinary people. Why else you set the actionable levels for blood lead to 4-6 times the general population.

Then again, I suppose IF you’re being paid more, it’s okay.

I’ve tried approaching the state and national workplace health and safety organisations about our little problem, and they don’t care or pass the buck. The lead industry as a whole has the comfort of working within the mandated workplace health and safety regulation. Surely lead workers should feel also a sense of deep comfort that their work environment is in compliance with appropriate government regulations.

I’m not sure I would be though. I’d have to be crazy to put up with something like that.