I’d better start with a disclaimer insofar as these blogs are a living document. As I get new information, or gain a new insight, that will hopefully be reflected in amendments to my commentary. There are a lot of blog posts below this one if you continue to scroll down. Please read them if you have time.

This blog represents a journey of discovery where I first found out about all the effects of lead, showed my disgust at the fact the dangers of lead weren’t being treated seriously, and have finally come to the conclusion that we can do something to protect children and adults from long term harm from lead, that the only thing missing is the will of the authorities to do something.

Life isn’t that simple, but that’s my aim: to educate people that lead exposure is dangerous and harmful in the long term because it is cumulative, and that we can do something to stop the harm.

But that’s not where we are at the moment.

When news of elevated blood lead levels are seen in the News media, it is almost always about lead exposure to the youngest members of our community. Children aged 2 and under tend to suffer the most devastating and potentially permanent consequences of lead poisoning. While it is wholly appropriate and necessary for resources to be designated to reducing the harmful impact of lead in children, the impact of lead on older adults should not be ignored.

But what if the harmful effects of lead exposure on children are being ignored as well?

When I first started this blog, I assumed, somewhat naively, that the many failures in workplace health and safety (WHS), lead exposure monitoring and treatment for lead poisoning following lead exposure were due to ignorance. After all, what else would explain why the WHS regulations have remained fundamentally unchanged for nearly 50 years, despite the avalanche of clinical and epidemiological data that has become public knowledge since then. Inertia and unwillingness to change would surely not have held back advances that proved the basic assumptions that are the foundation of our WHS efforts pertaining to lead risk management were absolutely wrong.

Surely organizations (Resources Safety and Health Queensland, Safe Work Australia) with progressive mantras like “Our vision is for a zero serious harm resource sector in Queensland” would make an attempt to provide a true zero risk work environment for lead risk workers.

Nope. Safe Work Australia is hamstrung by legislation that means employers can effectively veto any progressive changes, while Resources Safety and Health are quite happy to hide behind the decades-old regulations that means workers exposed to lead will be harmed, and NOT be safe. The employers, firms like Glencore, are of course in compliance with the dated regulations. In many other contexts, the failure to act to protect workers would be labelled criminal negligence.

If we go away from WHS issues and concentrate on the general population, things appear better, but not that much.

I’ve tried to make this point multiple time, but it bears repeating. Everyone in our society has been exposed to lead, and the only question is how much they’ve accumulated up to now. Most of the lead that has ever been absorbed into your body is still there, mostly in your bones, and it is having a detrimental effect on your health.

I think I need to go back in time to provide the evidence for that statement.

The fact that lead was stored in the bones was common knowledge more than 80 years ago. Tissue specimens had been taken from the cadavers of lead workers and were analysed for lead content. The tissues with the greatest amount of lead were the bones, the brain, and the aorta.

Lead is handles like calcium in the body, and the brain has a high concentration of sulfur proteins and enzymes, but what is lead doing in the aorta?

Clinical studies have consistently demonstrated that lead exposure is associated with a negative impact on a range of health issues involving the heart, kidneys and brain. A number of large-scale epidemiological studies have indicated a strong link between elevated blood lead levels in adults and premature death from cardiovascular disease.

Monash University studies of a large number of Australian lead risk workers has shown higher death rates and much higher risks of cancer, particularly esophageal cancer. The US Veteran’s Administration has a large number of VA-sponsored studies of military veterans that show quite conclusively that as body lead levels increase, so do cardiovascular deaths.

The magnitude of the problem in Australia can be estimated if figures released by the US CDC are applied to the Australian population. It is possible that 35,000-40,000 Australian adults die prematurely each year from lead comorbidities, due to lead exposure over their lifetimes. This number of deaths is 10 times the deaths due to asbestos exposure.

Older adults who have lived in homes built before the mid-1970s for much of their adult life have been exposed to lead throughout their lifetimes due to the presence of lead paint in their homes. Houses and yards near major roadways are still heavily contaminated with lead as a result of the use of leaded petrol for nearly 70 years. Some of our food and water contains significant amounts of lead.

It is crucial to understand that we continue to accumulate more and more lead in our bones as we age. Most of it never leaves our bodies. As the total amount of lead in our bones and bodies increases, so do the ill effects of lead in our bodies.

A longitudinal study compared cognitive test results of men with both high bone lead levels and no bone lead levels. Men with higher levels of lead in their bones showed cognitive declines comparable to aging an extra five years. Participants of this study had not encountered occupational exposure to lead, causing researchers to conclude the lead exposure was community based, likely in their own homes, over the course of their adult lives.

In addition, researchers found that adults age 44 and older with only slightly raised blood lead levels (6.7 µg/dL as compared to the current actionable “limit” of >5ug/dL) had a 37 percent greater risk of death from any cause and 70 percent greater risk of death from cardiovascular disease than those without similarly elevated blood levels. Cardiovascular disease contributed to by lead exposure includes peripheral vascular disease and atherosclerosis.

Since testing for lead levels is not standard practice in Australia, no useable data is currently available to estimate the impact of lead exposure on older adults. 2016 Medicare data indicates that less than 1 in 2000 Australians had blood lead tests, a lower rate than in the year 2000. This data didn’t include workers exposed to occupational lead.

Physicians may also be unlikely to consider testing for elevated lead levels because many of the symptoms of lead poisoning are closely related to other conditions commonly seen in the aging population such as joint and muscle pain, high blood pressure, difficulties with memory or concentration and mood disorders.

This raises the interesting question that considering it is likely every single adult in Australia has been exposed to varying amounts of lead due to the legacy of lead paint and leaded petrol, plus lead in our food and water, how much of the ill effects of aging are actually due to accumulated lead exposure.

The only way to exclude the possibility that lead might be the cause of a disease state, is to test for the presence of significant amount of lead in the body. This is particularly true in the not uncommon scenario of lead being released from the bones by osteoporosis, cancer or inflammatory conditions and this can lead to dementia-like symptoms, due to raised blood lead levels rather than brain damage.

Is it acceptable that we should continue to ignore exposure to lead as a factor in our health as we age? The likely cost of ignoring lead exposure as a possible factor in a range of disease states is likely to be massive, so what are our various health departments doing?

Nothing much it seems. The only minimal acknowledgement of outcomes of lead exposure in children are pretty much limited to the 3 lead cities, Port Pirie, Broken Hill and Mount Isa. This ignores the fact that there are somewhat more than 4 million older houses in Australia, where both children and adults are or have been exposed to significant amounts of lead,

And yet, if you look for the potential causes of cardiovascular disease in adults, there is no mention of lead and its possible contribution to atherosclerosis or high blood pressure, but a lot on cholesterol levels and treatment with statins. Is the medical profession so heavily influenced by the large pharmaceutical companies that anything that doesn’t generate money for big pharma is ignored. Are they ignorant or do they simply not care about the effects of lead.

I’ve mentioned before that cattle in far North Queensland that are raised on lead-rich grazing land have high body (carcass) lead levels. That proved to be a financial problem for graziers because their customers (Indonesia) wouldn’t accept cattle that they deemed unfit for consumption because of high body lead levels. For the last 12 years, the cattle have had the lead removed so they were fit for consumption, but humans severely affected by lead exposure continue to die, untreated by our health services.

Where have we gone wrong? Why do we tolerate this scenario and why is there no apparent duty of care in the people we’ve trusted to keep us safe?