When I was doing some work for Rio Tinto in Weipa, there was a manager there who had an interesting and eminently sensible approach to problems. He’d say let’s stop and have a sanity check to make sure we’re going in the right direction.

Writing blogs has it’s good and bad sides. On the good side people see the latest stuff that interests you, and hopefully them. On the minus side, blogs slowly disappear to the end of the list and essentially disappear. So stuff I’ve said slowly becomes less visible.

Anyway, as the title of this blog says, I’d like to do a sanity check.

One of the things that I’ve tried to explain, that is really important is what a blood lead level means. From a workplace health and safety viewpoint it is used both as an indicator of lead exposure, and unfortunately and incorrectly as an indicator of the amount of lead in your body. That’s why the ignorant people that manage lead exposure risk think that when blood lead levels fall, the lead has left your body. Before anyone gets offended, I think ignorance is a fact of life because nobody mortal knows everything. Ignorance is curable as long as you’re willing to learn. On the other hand, if I say someone is stupid, that can definitely be taken as an insult.

The trouble with the ignorance on the lead safety side of things is that very little of the lead you absorb ever leaves your body unless you are conceiving or breast-feeding a child. Over the first few days after exposure, it goes to the soft tissues, and also to your bones. When blood lead levels (BLL or PbB) drop after acute exposure, the red blood cells being broken down have lost their lead. That reduces the amount of lead measurable in your blood.

The lead that gets stored in your bones gets recycled as bone is broken down and rebuilt, same as calcium. As a result, there is a constant low level release of lead from your bones that maintains a chronic, low, perhaps harmful level of lead in your blood. As the amount of lead in your bones increases, so does the blood lead level. As you accumulate more lead because of continued lead exposure, the background level of blood lead will increase, until it reaches a level where bad things start to happen.

I’ve talked about some of the bad things before so I probably don’t need to repeat things here. If you’re not interested in heart disease or vascular disease or neurological damage or cancer and the rest, reminding you isn’t going to help.

The only way to halt and maybe reverse the long-term effects of lead is to stop the accumulation of more lead and reduce what’s already there. That’s dead simple and if you were living somewhere else where the health services are a bit more on the ball, you’d being having lead removed right now. As is, the only advice I can offer you is self help.

There’s an illogical problem that arises if an organization were to admit that they had been doing things wrong. Improving lead safety procedures could be seen as an admission that previous procedures were wrong, AS THEY MOST CERTAINLY ARE.

Even in the face of lead-affected people possibly dying, and the children of lead affected mothers having their futures erased, it’s easier to do nothing.

There’s huge resistance to “admitting” that improvements are needed. There may be significant moral and legal pressure to fix things up, but resistance and inertia are winning at the moment because they are an integral part of the bureaucratic process.

I understand the reasons for this insanity, but I can’t ignore the outcome.

I’d like to recap, again, why I’m writing this blog. It was an act of desperation because I couldn’t get any organization I contacted to even admit, for the most part, that there was a problem in lead biohazard management. I needed some other way to get their notice and to get things off my chest. In the process of putting stuff together to talk about, I’ve found out some fascinating things about what lead does.

Maybe fascinating is less appropriate than frightening. Lead very much represents a silent epidemic that is having a huge and large invisible impact on community health, and the futures of children.

Please be aware that when I’m talking about the effects of lead, it’s because EVERYONE is getting exposed, not just people in Mt Isa or Broken Hill. Between lead paint on old house, busses and cars, lead contamination due to leaded petrol, lead in cattle from North Queensland, lead in vegetables grown in contaminated soil next to our highways, lead in spices or whatever, we’re all exposed to lead. Lead exposure becomes a bit more relevant if you’re working in a lead rich environment, but lead probably affects everyone in Queensland in one way or another.

But it’s a silent epidemic because nobody seems to want to know about it.

Queensland Health doesn’t want to know. The unions don’t want to know. RSHQ doesn’t want to know, Glencore absolutely doesn’t want to know. I haven’t had a reply from Robbie Katter yet so we’ll have to wait to pass judgement. It’s something many people in Mt Isa don’t talk about because they are afraid of affecting their jobs, their businesses, their community.

But lead doesn’t have to be an epidemic. We now have ways to safely remove lead from people and stop it being a hazard to people living in Mt Isa or anywhere else where lead contamination is a problem.

If only someone cared enough to start community programs to raise lead awareness and awareness of the fact that damage due to lead is NOT he inevitable price of living and working in Mt Isa. If there was a safe alternative, why would anyone risk themselves and their families for no reason?

That’s it for now.

But a last word about insanity is Einstein’s definition of insanity. That’s when a person keeps doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. That makes me worry a bit.