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How Lead Affects Our Health

A recent 2009 publication in Science News reported that children with high blood-lead level at age 5 and 6 are very likely to have a juvenile or adult criminal arrest for violent behavior such as assaults, rape and homicide. These inner-city kids have been followed from childhood to adulthood. This report underscores the dangerous effects of lead exposure and how it can affect us all as a society if we do not take initiatives to remove it from our water, food and environment.

What Happens To The Lead When It Gets Into Your Body?

When you are exposed to lead, it gets into your blood first. A blood test will easily show this. About 36 days after initial exposure, a subsequent blood test will only show about half of the total amount of lead in your first blood test. With time, this blood lead level decreases to a level that cannot be measured. But that does not mean that you are lead free. It just means that the leas has gone somewhere else in your body.

Lead circulating in the blood has by now found its way into your teeth, bone, and brain. At this stage, the place to look for lead is in the teeth. Teeth testing for lead content is a reliable test and can reveal how much lead you have been exposed to in the past.

Lead is stored in three major areas in your body - the brain, bones, and teeth. With repeated exposure, our bodies act like a storage tank, continuing to store up lead throughout our lives. Our bones are a major reservoir for lead. Lead continues to store up in our bones starting from fetal stage till about 60 years of age.

What Are the Effects of Lead Exposure?

The most serious effect of lead toxicity is mental
retardation. Lead affects everyone, young and old, but the effects are worse in young children than in adults.

Below is the list of documented ill-effects of lead poisoning.

● lead affects the brain, resulting in lower intelligence.

● poor school performance, learning and memory.

● cause adult male sterility.

● cause increased incidences of miscarriages and stillbirths.

● mothers with high blood lead levels give birth to infants with lower I.Q.

Effects of lead poisoning were done on kids living near lead smelters and factories in Germany. Teeth tissue lead testing was assessed on their primary teeth. Those kids with toxic lead exposure were followed for years on academic performance. It was found that there was strong positive correlation between high tooth lead levels and low school achievement. These kids also had problems with speech and language ability, attention deficit problem, and lower classroom performance, when compared to kids with less amounts of lead exposure.

Further follow-up of these kids with high tooth lead showed that the effects were devastating:

● a sevenfold increase in the odds of failing to graduate from high school.
● lower class standing.

● greater absenteeism.

● reading disabilities.

● deficits in vocabulary skills.

● deficits in fine motor skills

● slower reaction time.

● poor hand-eye coordination.

● poor social skills and motivation.

● great tendency toward truancy and juvenile delinquency. Many of these kids eventually end up in jail.

Lead Is Transferred From A Mother To Her Unborn Child

Our bones serve as a lifetime storage for lead. When a mother is poisoned with lead, her unborn child is poisoned too. This is because the lead stored in her bone tissue moves out of her bone storage into her blood and to her unborn child through the umbilical cord. Studies have shown that the amount of lead in umbilical cord blood during pregnancy was at 85-90% of the total amount in the mother's blood.

Mothers With High Blood Lead Levels Produce Babies With Lower Intelligence

Researchers looked at intelligence tests given to infants born to two groups of mothers. Babies born to mothers with high and low lead exposure as shown in blood tests were followed over time. Results indicated that the group of mothers with high blood lead have babies with delayed development and scored lower in intelligence tests than the other group.