Exposure to lead can have devastating effects on young children, and have serious long-term effects on older children and adults.

But that no longer needs to be the case.

We have the technology to assess risk and the efficacy of protective measures that has been available and in use for over 30 years. Well tolerated oral chelating agents, in use for over 60 years, can minimize the absorption of lead and remove lead that has been absorbed in the body. Industrial chelators can be used to decontaminate, or more correctly passivate lead in the environment.

So why aren’t we doing something right now?

We can’t move forward until there are some pretty fundamental changes at multiple levels. A variety of workplace health and safety (WHS) organizations, state and federal are uninterested in any sort of change. Lead risk employers don’t want to open a Pandora’s box of issues related to their failure to protect workers, and simply pass the buck to the WHS regulators.

Queensland Health seems to have a policy of “we’re doing good work in Mount Isa” and pretty much ignore the effects of lead elsewhere in the state. The true state of affairs is probably worse since Queensland Health has consistently failed to pursue lead safety issues for the last 12 years. Treatment is mostly restricted to severe lead poisoning in children and nothing is done except the occasional environmental auditing for subclinical lead poisoning.

But if the sole focus is on Mount Isa, what has happened there in the last decade or so?

We can probably start with a 4 triple J article in HACk by James Purtill in 2017 (Indigenous health workers say lead education failing Mount Isa kids – triple j).

A short summary would be that Aboriginal health workers were concerned about the ineffectiveness of measures dealing with lead exposure of aboriginal children in Mt Isa.

When Robbie Katter, local MP and head of the Lead Alliance which “manages lead safety” in Mount Isa, was asked about the situation he is quoted as saying:

“We’re the stakeholders, we’re the ones affected by it,” he said.

“The only conclusion you can draw from [questions about lead] is people saying we’re so ignorant here we don’t know there’s a problem, or secondly we don’t care about our kids’ welfare or thirdly we care more about money than we do our kids’ health.”

We know what the risks are and that there isn’t a problem there.”

That pretty much sums up the perceived situation in Mount Isa, that there isn’t a problem.

I really wish that was true.

Protecting the economic life of Mount Isa by downplaying the health risks from the mine and smelter was historically an understandable strategy. But protectionism of that sort is pretty toxic when newcomers to Mount Isa express concern about the effects of lead on their children. University and ABC News interviews of Mount Isa residents showed quite clearly that if you want to have a quiet life in Mount Isa, then lead safety isn’t a topic of dicussion.

Ignoring a problem for long enough that it becomes someone else’s problem is a favorite commercial and political strategy. But it doesn’t make the problem go away, it just leaves it for the next generation.

If lead can be prevented from being absorbed, if already absorbed lead can be removed, it ceases to be a problem.

I’d like to repeat something I’ve covered before in a bit more detail to put this comment into perspective.

There is a huge area in far north Queensland, a rough triangle with it’s tip on Mount Isa, and it’s base on both sides of the Gulf of Carpentaria, where there is a lot of lead in the ground. Anything that grows on that land is exposed to lead, including plants, animals and people. That’s got nothing to do with mining or smelting activities because lead exposure is ubiquitous.

Interesting enough, the far north Queensland graziers are far mosr realistic than the people of Mount Isa. The story is worth retelling.

Australia had a thriving live export trade of cattle to Indonesia, shipped out of Darwin. Over a decade ago, Indonesia found that the cattle had levels of lead that made them unfit for human consumption, and that halted imports.

The solution for that problem turned out to be fairly simple. Cattle were kept in a feedlot for several weeks and fed an industrial chelator (TMT) that removed lead from their bodies. This wasn’t a cheap solution from the viewpoint of the cost of testing and agistment costs, but it resulted in cattle that were fit for human consumption and sale.

It obviously occurred to some of the graziers that if their cattle living on the land had a lot of lead on board, then it was likely that they were absorbing lead as well. While medical opinion in Queensland largely ignores the risk of lead, or states any deleterious effects are permanent, the graziers KNEW that lead could be removed from cattle.

They treated their vegetable gardens and yards near the station house with TMT, which has not only been shown to decontaminate the soil so vegetables contain no lead, but TMT also stimulates plant growth, something that has recently been patented.

As far as the cattle are concerned, a different approach to preventing lead absorption is based on trace metal augmentation in Western Australia. If cattle are provided with salt licks with added low levels of lead chelator and sugar (cattle love the sweetness) it’s likely that they will no longer absorb enough lead from their environment for it to be a problem.

Doing nothing and ignoring the problem of lead in the environment wasn’t an option for the graziers so they’re exploring solutions to make living with lead safe, both in terms of health and income,

I really need to stress, again and again, that it is the absorption and accumulation of lead in the body, in the bones, that comprises the health risk from lead. If lead absorption can be blocked, if lead already in the body can be safely removed, lead ceases to be a health risk.

That’s pretty simple really. But let’s see what else can be done,

A 6-month double blind trial was carried out in Morocco in 2016 with Swiss funding, to test the effectiveness of iron supplementation and lead removal on children’s cognitive abilities. The trial found that iron in combination with EDTA (in the form of ferric disodium EDTA) produced a net decrease of 30% in BLL (blood lead level) at the end of the trial. The authors concluded “Our findings suggest that NaFeEDTA should be the iron fortificant of choice in lead-exposed populations”

Several points have to be made about this trial. The children continued to be exposed to lead but still showed a decrease in BLL, indicating a net reduction in body lead burden. The still relatively high endpoint BLL may be due to raised bone lead levels due to chronic lead exposure.

While no cognitive test improvements were seen, the BLL endpoint achieved was still at a level where there is cognitive decline. Unless the BLL endpoint is below 1ug/dL, it is likely that cognitive or behavioural improvement will not be achieved.

Nevertheless, treating both conditions (iron deficiency and lead poisoning) together  recognises that they are often seen together because lead suppresses iron absorption and haem production, and iron deficiency causes Pica, a condition where children will eat more lead-contaminated dirt.

As far as safety goes, ferric EDTA has been used as a paediatric iron fortificant in France for over 50 years, it has also been endorsed by the WHO as an iron fortificant. It is also registered as a food additive in Australia.

Surely the children of Queensland deserve better, whether they live in Mount Isa, in the lead-rich areas north of Mount Isa, or in the many older houses covered in lead paint. I should also mention Townsville, Queensland’s other lead city, and all the people living near the railway right-of-way between Mount Isa and Townsville, and near major roads where house and land were contaminated with lead from leaded petrol.

Regardless of where the lead comes from, we can now prevent the health risk, if the will exists to do something.

Maybe in 2025…