If you want to get up to speed on how and why I’m writing this blog called part 2, just scroll down to the bottom of this post and read the previous one.

I thought I’d start things off by sending Glencore an email to highlight the fact that they now had a mention in my brand new blog. Yesterday night I got a formal response via a PDF document enclosed in an email. It was from the Principal – Health and Hygiene.

Rather than just posting the whole letter I’ll present the interesting bits.

But first let me repeat the gist of what I’ve done beforehand that’s covered pretty well in the previous post.

I went to Glencore to tell them that their existing WHS policies would lead to severe medical consequences for lead workers. I presented them with the latest scientific studies to support my claims.

In the last few weeks, I also presented them with support material for a proposal to:

(1) Use a portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometer (XRF) to measure bone lead levels because 95% of the lead in your body is in bone. XRF would take 2 minutes to estimate how much lead you’re carrying in your body, with no needles required. The amount of lead in workers bodies could be determined. This is important because in the presence of continued lead exposure, blood lead levels only indicate the level of lead circulating in the blood, not how much lead is already there, accumulated in the body.

XRF would let Glencore evaluate the legal risk it carries for not dealing with lead intoxication in their lead workers, and it provides the workers with an idea of the risk they’re facing. In an ideal world it could be used to monitor how effective the lead removal procedures were working, that’s not looking good at the moment.

(2) Use oral chelation therapy to remove dangerous levels of lead from the workers as needed, or maybe even consider using it prophylactically to stop lead ever accumulating at all.

That is a total win-win for everyone. It wouldn’t cost a lot, and might actually save money at so many levels.

After all it ought to be a lot easier to actually give some meaning to the present empty words about providing a safe work environment and all that entails for the lead workforce. It would certainly be cheaper than the present out of court settlements when workers wake up to the reality of what lead has done to them. Also much cheaper than the possibility of a class action by workers who have left Mt Isa and found out they have a dreadful legacy of their time there because workplace health and safety failed them.

I’m kind of old fashioned about not doing something to protect workers when you know better, when a bit of positive effort could completely remove a major risk factor for workers. It seems kind of obscene and amoral to ignore a scenario where you know you’re doing harm to someone. Why don’t workplace health and safety just carry out their job description? You know, keep workers healthy and safe?

But that’s not how a company like Glencore works.

I guess someone could suggest I’m against lead mining and smelting, but I’m absolutely not. Regardless of what the Greens think about mining, I realize that people need jobs, and a place like Mt Isa is an important hub for the local region.

But wouldn’t it be nice if lead wasn’t a danger to lead workers or their families? If you didn’t have the niggling worry that living in Mt Isa might end badly for you and your kids? Wouldn’t it be nice if Glencore and Queensland Health gave a damn?

Anyway, here are the highlights: of the official response letter:

(1) Whilst your point that blood lead is a labile indicator is valid, we are nonetheless compelled to manage workers in accordance with their blood lead levels, pursuant to the Mining and Quarrying Safety and Health Regulation 2017 (Schedule 2E Health surveillance; Part 4 Lead health surveillance and Division 2 Lead health surveillance).

That’s pretty blunt. We accept that the regulations are wrong and workers are at risk, but it’s easier to comply with the rules than be proactive and protect our lead workers. Misguided regulations are okay, but protecting workers health in a meaningful way isn’t. I hope that makes lead workers feel warm and fuzzy.

(2) In terms of using an XRF spectrometer, at present in Queensland there is no facility for the analysis of cortical bone lead burden nor is there a regulated standard for which there is an acceptable lead burden. In addition, we would not want to expose any of our employees to an unnecessary radiological risk.

I did suggest they had to buy or lease a portable XRF . They obviously didn’t read or understand the scientific papers I provided about the extensive work with portable XRF at Purdue University, specifically in measuring human bone lead levels. Purdue even used cadavers for validation. I passed on the offer from Purdue University to help set up a calibrated facility in Queensland. They could establish XRF if they wanted to.

The comment about radiation dose is a nice touch, but kind of ignorant when you realise the dose in 2 minutes from a portable XRF is a lot lower than the dose you get from the lead dust in your workplace. Yes, lead ore is slightly radioactive (U235 and Pb210).
It’s likely the cost of leasing an XRF spectrometer and getting someone from Purdue University over to help set everything up properly would be less than a couple of tires on the big trucks.

But worker’s health is obviously not worth that much to head office.

(3)Your proposal to trial the use of an oral chelation treatment would be experimental and the implications and applicability to a working age demographic are yet to be established. Again, we would not put our employees at risk of potential mild or serious side effects for a pilot program.

Despite the fact that oral chelators are freely available from multiple health supplement sources, and tens of thousands of people have used them for over 60 years without apparent harm if managed properly, and oral chelators have also been used to protect lead workers from the damage caused by lead 60 years ago safely and without risk? 

The much more important and well known risk faced by lead risk workers is the lead they have in the bodies as a result of regulations that only care about measuring and reducing exposure, and not what happens as the result of continued exposure.

Your employers don’t care enough about the damage lead does to you to have even run a small voluntary trial to see if it will lower lead levels.

There’s nothing stopping people from getting some calcium sodium EDTA themselves. I’ve provided all the information in a later blog.

If your employer won’t provide protection because they don’t want to, you’ll have to do it yourself. Up the workers.

And if we’re talking about risk, I’d like to point out again that the risk of doing nothing is far greater for lead workers. You are at risk from lead you breathed in or ingested despite all the other provisions to minimize dust exposure. Nothing is being done by your employer to minimize the biological risk from lead that you’ve already accumulated in your body. Nothing.

(4) We have a range of stakeholders including health experts that we engage with around the management of occupational exposure, with the implementation and monitoring of any measures based on strong clinical evidence and supported by peak medical bodies and State and/or Federal Government.

I’m prepared to label that as bullshit. The stakeholders didn’t even pick up the information in “Hunter’s Diseases of Occupations” or anywhere else that most lead absorbed or ingested sticks around in the brain (1-2) years or the bones (decades)? Or that lead accumulates in the body (bones) over time? How could anyone miss those “small” details unless they had selective blindness, or does it reflect the quality of your experts? That’s shameful. If what we have is the best that the experts can do, they aren’t interested in the best interests of their workers, only the best interests of Glencore.

I’d like to repeat the message about the extra lead burden that lead workers carry because we’re talking about something that will definitely make people sick in one way or the other in the future, it not right now. If you don’t remove the lead you get from working as a lead worker, you will suffer any number of medical conditions in the rest of your life.

There’s an official estimate that lead co-morbidities are responsible for 400,000 deaths in the USA every year. That’s deaths where lead was a contributing factor. Would it surprise you to find out the higher the body lead, the worse the risk?

So there we are. The official response is pretty much a justification for doing nothing. After all, the people at head office aren’t exposed to lead, it’s not a danger to them. If it was, they’d probably do something.

Besides, that’s what lead workers signed up for, isn’t it? You knew you were going to get sick sooner or later. That is the cost of working with lead, sacrifice your health so you can house and feed your family.

If workplace health and safety is about preventing foreseeable risks, why didn’t someone start looking at solutions to minimise the risk from lead 20 or more years ago? Chelation therapy for lead workers was first used over 60 years ago, and yet here we are, in 2023 and WHS is still not protecting lead workers from the known ill effects of lead biohazards.

I’ve been given some names to contact at Resources Safety and Health Queensland so I will do so.