“Lead is deceiving – hidden in sweet-tasting paint and plaster on the very walls of homes”

I’ve talked about lead paint before, but mostly as part of the complete picture of lead hazards. In a lot of ways, lead paint is the most serious lead hazard faced by all Queenslanders.

Lead paint is an industrial poison where the risks were denied by parts of the scientific community, with concerted attempts made to hide the truth. Dealing with this potent poison effectively should have been done by now, but short-lived public outcries, failed prevention campaigns, and regulations that were promoted but never implemented have ensured it is still a very real and present hazard. Our public authorities have endorsed lead paint by their inaction.

I’ve also talked about lead risk workers, and while their government-ordained lead risk management is a travesty and disgrace, they at least have some idea of the dangers involved in working with lead.

Many people renovating older houses have little appreciation of the truly grave dangers involved in sanding lead painted surfaces. That comment about most people being ignorant of the dangers of lead includes most professional painters because no one enforces the safety standards around how to handle lead paint. There are safety standards, but they aren’t compulsory.

I’d like to quote some sections out of the “Lead Paint Hazards” page on the Painters Institute web site (Australian Lead Paint Hazards and Risks (painters.edu.au)). The Painting Institute comments will be in italics, with bolding and comments added by me.

Lead paint is common in Australian buildings built before 1971.

To protect yourself and your family, always choose a qualified painter trained in lead paint management. Find a lead paint qualified painter (https://www.painters.edu.au/Flnd-A-Painter.htm)

This of course assumes you know you might have lead paint on your house, you’ve bought a lead test paint at Bunnings, and have found that lead paint is present, or perhaps the painter is one of the few who is lead paint aware. It also assumes you’re willing to pay 2-3 times as much for a safe lead paint removal job.

The discovery linking lead paint with health issues was actually made in the 1930’s by a doctor in Queensland, but paint containing signicant quantities of lead was manufactured in most states of Australia up until the late 1960’s. Concern over the consequences of the use of lead in paint caused Queensland to ban its use in 1922 and other states to reduce its presence from 1950. National legislation was introduced in 1969 to restrict lead content.

From 1970 onwards, lead content was reduced to below l%. Current paints generally include much lower lead content (0.1% since December 1997) or are even lead free.

It may be assumed therefore that buildings constructed after 1970 will not exhibit high lead levels. This would be quite incorrect
Even in Queensland, where legislation was enacted at an early date, any buildings more than 20 years old should be considered suspect, particularly if old, industrial or marine paints have been used.
Industrial protective coatings’ frequently are produced under different regulations to ‘domestic paints‘. Their use was however, not always confined to industrial structures. The only way for the painter to be sure that they are not dealing with lead based paints is to carry out an approved testing procedure.

I’d like to expand the comment about industrial protective coatings, because they were often defined as industrial simply by their bigger containers, and greater quantities of paint. This meant that large building companies continued to buy lead paint in bulk (which was less expensive) and subsequently used it for painting houses, and this applies to much of the public housing in Queensland.

If you haven’t done the testing and so on and have just gotten quotes from painters, picked the lowest quote and told them to go ahead, there’s every chance you’ll contaminate your yard and neighborhood with lead paint chips and dust, and if you’ve got kids or animals, they’ll get lead poisoned together with you.

Painters have a high rate of actionable blood lead levels in Queensland, so it’s pretty obvious that most painters don’t know about lead paint, unless they don’t care or think lead paint is safe.

So how common are houses that probably have lead paint, even if was only used as a primer or undercoat inside? There are estimated to be 3.5 million houses in Australia that are likely to be painted with lead paint. If you live in an older suburb, be warned.

Most of the public housing built in the 1960s to 1970s in Brisbane, is liable to have been painted with lead paint.

There are incidents recorded of older house renovations creating a cluster of lead-poisoned children living near the house being sanded.

I guess the next obvious thing to talk about is the history of the awareness of the dangers of lead paint in Queensland. I also think it would be educational to compare lead paint to asbestos, the other industrial scourge that was “discovered” to be harmful.

Our local Queensland MP has a great aunt whose sister died from licking lead paint. Kidney failure (nephritis) and encephalopathy (a condition that exhibits as brain dysfunction) were common in the early 1900s, and as noted by the Painters Institute in the comments above, the connection between lead paint and sick children in the Brisbane Hospital for Sick Children, was first published by Dr Leslie Jon Jarvis Nye in the Australian Medical Journal in 1933. His paper “Chronic Nephritis and Lead Poisoning” so concerned the Lead Industry Cartel that they commissioned a “scientific” monograph to refute it.

This was despite the fact that the Queensland government had “banned” lead paint in 1922, but it continued to be used. A law that isn’t enforced because of political influence is worse than useless.

A careful analysis published in 1955 of a remarkable epidemic of childhood lead poisoning in Queensland and the attendant renal disease established beyond reasonable doubt the existence of lead nephropathy. The conclusion was:

“Victorian houses in Queensland characteristically had closed verandas, painted with lead-based paint. Such verandas were ideal for confining small children while their mothers were busy in the house. From daily rain showers in this subtropical region, rain droplets hung on the railings and tasted sweet from dissolved lead. They were within the reach of toddlers, who enjoyed wiping up and licking the rain droplets.”

That’s not hard to understand, and yet, despite the obvious danger to children, lead paint has never been completely banned because there were too many “special cases” where it could continue to be used and is still used today. One use of lead in paint is as a drying agent for ordinary spray paint. Lead assists the setting of paint by generating free radicals, one of the bad things it does in your body.

The story of asbestos is much like the story of lead paint, except for the ending of the story. Asbestos was a very useful material, a wonder product. The asbestos industry was extremely effective in lobbying the government to ensure its continued use, and in promoting subtle public campaigns to promote the perception that asbestos was terribly useful and not dangerous.

Discovery of the link between asbestos and cancer happened in 1934 but it took another 8 years before the first warnings were posted. The first report of a mesothelioma tumor came a year later and by 1949 asbestos was widely understood to be harmful in many countries, except in Australia.

Asbestos product use in Australia boomed in the 1950s and consumption of asbestos products continued to grow and exceed usage in other countries, so much so that Australia became known for the highest per capita consumption of asbestos in the world.

The dangers of asbestos were hidden and denied and the first regulations on asbestos weren’t put in to place in Australia until 1978. But common forms of asbestos were still being imported and used until the 2000s. A nationwide ban of asbestos products didn’t happen until 2003, over 50 years after it was recognized as being harmful.

I guess the moral of the story, at least from the asbestos industries’ viewpoint is if you tell a lie long enough, people will believe it. If it hadn’t been for the public images of a man with mesothelioma fighting for justice in the courts while fighting for his life, asbestos might still be in use today.

The parallels with lead paint are certainly there, but as I said, the ending of the story is different so far. Lead in paint is still not banned, lead paint removal is still not regulated.

The horrors of lead paint haven’t yet been brought to the public consciousness, in part because the effects of lead poisoning are more subtle unless you have the “proper” recognized clinical symptoms of lead poisoning of 70 years ago.

The realization that young children are the ones most seriously affected at much lower levels of lead exposure is one of the reasons I started this blog. Queensland Health obviously don’t view reduced IQ, learning difficulties and behavioral problems leading to youth violence and crime as clinical indications of lead poisoning. It’s probably time our Health authorities updated their view of what constitutes unacceptable levels of lead.

At a government level it’s easier to have “special schools” hidden away in industrial estates where you send students who are too much trouble in regular schools. Hiring more police, arresting more young adults and building more detention centres to reduce youth crime is obviously simpler.

In the absence of testing of blood lead levels almost everywhere except Mt Isa, that’s possibly not surprising. Besides, doing nothing is the way most departments deal with uncomfortable facts, unless things get too politically embarassing.

There are most certainly other sources of lead in Queensland such as lead contamination from decades of burning leaded petrol along our major roads and highways or contamination from mining and smelting of lead, but for sheer concentrated exposure to lead, lead paint has to be viewed as the most dangerous form of lead in Queensland.

One of the biggest “problem” with dealing with the lead paint danger is obvious if we go back to the history of asbestos. While there are standards for the safe removal of lead paint, they are neither mandatory, nor well publicised. While the dangers of lead paint are well known to a few people, there hasn’t been a public campaign to make everyone aware of the dangers of lead paint.

And we can’t afford to ignore the present day equivalent of the lead industry cartel that tried to discredit Dr Leslie Nye’s concerns about the dangers of lead paint to children over 90 years ago. The same factors are still in play today. If we consider that one of the significant sources of lead paint is public housing, we have to remember that when governments are faced with huge problems, the first reaction is denial that a problem exists.

The only way that will change is if enough people who are genuinely concerned about the dangers of lead paint to themselves and their children, are prepared to take legal action against the relevant government departments for their inaction and negligence.

In 1969, environmentalist René Dubos warned that the problem of childhood lead poisoning “is so well-defined, so neatly packaged, with both causes and cures known, that if we don’t eliminate this social crime, our society deserves all the disasters that have been forecast for it.”