The last few weeks have been a bit challenging, because my mostly academic study of all things lead has gotten uncomfortably real. I’ve been put in touch with a group of people who have been severely lead poisoned, and the reality of what they’ve gone through has really emphasized just how bad lead poisoning can be.

Before I talk about what these people have been through, I also need to make you understand why this stuff bothers me, why I’m somewhat qualified to make the comments I’m going to make below.

Fistly, I’m not a real people doctor, but I have a PhD in Medicine, with 14 years in medical research, primarily looking at iron metabolism in rats and in humans. When I started my literature review on the effects of lead, that background has helped me get a fairly thorough understanding of the issues around lead poisoning because I understand the “language”, the importance of good experimental design, statistical analysis and the importance of having a good foundational knowledge of your subject.

In the last 2 years I’ve read hundreds of scientific and clinical articles relating to the effects of lead, the sources of lead, lead pollution, how lead is handled in the body, and possible treatment options for lead poisoning. As my understanding of lead issues grew, I have also come to the unwelcome conclusion that the interpretation of many lead-related clinical results are deeply flawed, most often because the authors didn’t understand how absorbed lead was handled in the body, or so I hoped.

So where did they get it wrong?

Lead ACCUMULATES in the body and is “stored” in the bones, just like the calcium it mimics. Kind of like a cuckoo in the nest. That bone lead is in balance with circulating lead, and it is responsible for the many long-term, often serious health effects. It doesn’t take a lot of lead to have neurological effects, which can be devastating in children, and the long life of lead in the body means those effects can still be present many decades later in adults.

Lead is a slow and inexorable toxin and ignoring the effects of lead is so common that I think of it as criminal negligence at multiple levels. Even in Mount Isa, Broken Hill and Port Pirie, where the presence and danger of lead is somewhat acknowledged and attempts are made to minimize lead exposure for children, the authorities seem primarily interested in appearing to do something to reassure the local communities that the problem is in good hands. It really isn’t.

But I need to get back on track.

This blog has been going on for over 18 months now, and I’ve had quite a lot to say, particularly about workplace health and safety regulations pertaining to lead risk work, and the stupidity and ignorance that has resulted in the word safety becoming an oxymoron when it comes to managing risk from exposure to lead. There is NO safety for lead risk workers when it comes to Workplace Health and Safety. Workers are exposed to harm and that harm, which is very real, is actively ignored. The authorities ought to know better, but after 50 years of ignoring the problem, the lack of care becomes habitual.

I’ve previously posted about the various effects of lead poisoning like increased cardiovascular disease, neurological effects, increased kidney disease, cancer, gout and son on. There is a lot of solid epidemiological data which absolutely supports the conclusion that lead is a slow and deadly toxin that accumulates in your body. There is NO evidence to suggest that lead is safe, but I still had no idea of just how bad things could get and the beyond criminal negligence of most employers and regulatory and health authorities.

In my opinion Workplace Health and Safety doesn’t manage lead risk workers’ safety or health risks, they just stand by and let it happen. If there is any conscience or care when it comes to lead risk workers, I’ve yet to detect any. I’ve approached employers, state WHS regulators, Safe Work Australia and the NHMRC. They simply don’t care enough to make any effort to change what is an intolerable situation where lead risk workers are having their future lives ruined.

And the problem goes further. You’ll rarely come across a physician that understands what lead exposure does, who knows anything much about treatment options and has an understanding of just how disastrous a significant lead burden cab be in the body. Just try asking for a blood lead test. The testing rate for non-occupational blood lead levels in 2016 (last available Medicare figures) was less than 1 in 2000 Australians and it’s no higher now.

You could be forgiven for thinking lead exposure isn’t a problem, despite 7 decades of lead pollution from leaded petrol, old houses painted with lead paint and the lead pollution from their renovation, and the indiscriminate pollution of ports like Townsville and Esperance. I’d better also mention spray painters of old cars, battery manufacture and recycling, and of course shooters, in particular soldiers. The great things from the authorities’ viewpoint is that if we don’t test for lead, then there’s no indication that there is an unresolved problem. They seem to work pretty hard to keep things under wraps. Why?

There are ample indications, including an editorial article in The Lancet, that ignoring the effects of lead exposure has a huge health care and economic cost.

Have YOU heard about the dangers of lead, the real dangers? Despite lead paint being a major risk for painters, home renovators and their families, the Australian standard is behind a paywall. The Painters Institute (https://painters.edu.au/) has quite a lot of useful information. about lead paint dangers, but the fact that one of the biggest group of people with notifiable blood lead levels are painters, the information isn’t widely known, even by the professionals. DIYers mostly haven’t got a chance to avoid being lead poisoned and if the adults are poisoned, so are the children.

I’ve pointed out in the past that children are particularly liable to be lead poisoned. But while that ought to suggest there needs to be more visibility about lead poisoning in children, paediatricians are often quite intractable when it comes to admitting the possibility that a child with symptoms in the autism spectrum might be lead-poisoned and often refusing to test blood lead unless the parents insist. If the child is found to have non-clinical levels of lead (10-40 ug/dL), treatment is unlikely. Chelation is viewed as a last resort treatment.

If your or your child’s doctor doesn’t understand that lead poisoning isn’t trivial, doesn’t realize the extent of the damage that can result, has a bias against chelation therapy removing lead because it’s “dangerous, can cause kidney or liver damage or death” and thinks that the consequences of lead exposure are irreversible, that’s pretty normal and absolutely untrue.

I’ve been in a debate with Queensland Health’s lead “expert”, a toxicologist based in Townsville (whose area of interest is marine stingers) where he justifies doing nothing for children in Mount Isa who had raised (above 10 ug/dL but below 45ug/dL) blood lead levels on the basis of badly designed clinical trials in the 1980s that proved “chelation doesn’t achieve anything” and concluded neurological damage caused by lead was irreversible. Besides being largely wrong, it does illustrate the stupefyingly awful level of ignorance displayed in various Health departments in Australia when it comes to lead.

Historically we have had medical “influencers” like Robert A Kehoe in the US to thank for the broadly held medical belief that lead exposure from leaded petrol and other sources is no big deal, and that opinion together with an abysmal knowledge of the toxicology and pharmacokinetics of lead in the body leaves us where we are today, surrounded by ignorance and the resulting indifference.

We are in the grips of a wide-spread “epidemic” of high- and low-level lead poisoning that affects nearly everyone in the community, especially children. An epidemic that is responsible for 10 times as many deaths as asbestos, an epidemic that has cost untold billions of dollars to date, and our authorities are still looking the other way.

This is Australia, not some third-world country where the mining companies and fuel companies have corrupted the government!

Isn’t it?

I’m going to give you some examples of just how bad lead poisoning can be, but I’ll add a bit more information so you might take this seriously.

I’ve been communicating with people who hopefully represent worst-case scenario. I said hopefully because I can’t envisage anything worse. It would be fair to ask how something this bad could have happened, and there are some reasons that make sense.

There was an undoubted lack of due care by their employers, who let worker’s body lead levels build up to obscenely high levels. A lack of transparency about the dangers associated with the lead risk work meant workers were ignorant of the dangers of lead and didn’t know they were straying into a mine field of medical conditions. Existing WHS regulations state that the employer is obliged to provide full disclosure of the health risks involved in lead risk work. I have yet to find a lead risk worker that had been advised of the dangers by their employer.

The following are just brief glimpses of what happened. I’ve asked the people involved if I could publish their full stories and I hope to be able to do so. The companies and authorities involved deserve to be named and shamed.

One worker, a gold assayist, was severely lead poisoned but wasn’t advised of the fact by his employer. One of the outcomes of the poisoning was neurological because he used to suffer uncontrollable rages. It wasn’t until seven years later that a doctor finally found high blood lead levels and started chelation therapy which almost immediately resulted in normal behavior. That represents a failure both on the part of his employer, and subsequent medical attention. There’s more but I haven’t had permission yet.

Another worker, also a gold assayist, had an undiagnosed heart attack at age 34, probably because his coronary arteries were blocked, but while this was likely the result of lead poisoning, the high lead levels weren’t detected until 10 years later, over 30 years since the original poisoning. One of the effects of lead in the body is osteoporosis, which is mostly a woman’s condition but his osteoporosis resulted in his jaw disintegrating and all his teeth fallingout. His upper jaw had to be rebuilt with a bone graft. He still has a notifiable blood lead level after 40 years but never received any compensation because the evidence that he had been lead-poisoned at his place of employment, his medical records, had been “lost” by the health department and were no longer available.

A worker exposed to tetraethyl lead suffered serious lead poisoning, causing severe stomach and bowel problems, a massive hernia, including into the chest cavity. Add his teeth falling out and two heart attacks to make life more interesting. No treatment or recognition of fault was forthcoming from his employer, and his 150 work colleagues were often no better off. His medical records were conveniently lost.

And we have a woman who never worked in a lead risk environment. But her mother did. She became lead poisoned in utero, and was topped up with lead by being breast-fed by her mother. She has had quite severe osteoporosis which has led to partial disintegration of her vertebrae, and despite only being exposed to lead as a child, her blood lead levels are still elevated.

Anyone foolish enough to think that “lead rapidly leaves the body”, the basis of our WHS management of excess lead exposure, might want to take note of the fact these people still had high blood lead levels many decades AFTER their last lead exposure. I’d recommend watching this YouTube video by Dr Michael Kosnett if you have any doubts: https://youtu.be/FTQ7q6bNtwE

Lead poisoning leads to lifelong problem. The truly inexcusable failure of our medical services to detect and treat lead-poisoned people just makes the whole thing so much worse.

Monash University has a longitudinal study of nearly 5000 lead risk workers, with the usual statistics of increase cardio vascular disease, but one thing that really stood out for me was a seven-fold increase in oesophageal cancer. That’s a really miserable way to die.

Workplace Health and Safety doesn’t manage lead risk workers safety or health risks, they just stand by and let it happen, and often assist in the cover-up afterwards.

And just to round up the information. the last example I’ll talk about is about a series of longitudinal studies which investigated the the neurological and psychological status of adults who had been lead-exposed as children.

The conclusion drawn from just one of the studies, which was in agreement with the others was:

In this multidecade, longitudinal study of lead-exposed children, higher childhood blood lead level was associated with greater psychopathology across the life course and difficult adult personality traits. Childhood lead exposure may have long-term consequences for adult mental health and personality.

Lead that accumulates in the body can have life-long subtle and not so subtle effects on our personalities and mental health. While lead is a persistent neurotoxin, it that can be removed, but usually isn’t unless you live in more enlightened countries like Italy or India rather than Australia or New Zealand.

Do you ever wonder why ADHD is so common?