"How the Lead Paint Industry Got Away With It"
We have known that lead can be toxic for thousands of years,
and specifically that children could be poisoned by lead paint over a century ago.
And since those first cases,
the lead industry has mobilized against the advances of science.
By 1926, lead poisoning was already a "relatively frequent occurrence in children,"
yet the United States continued to allow the use of lead-based paint until 1978.
In contrast, over in Europe, many countries said, hmm, poisoning children?
No thanks, and "banned the use of lead paint as early as 1909."
The delay in the U.S. was due largely to the proud marketing and lobbying efforts
of the industry profiting from the poison.
They knew they couldn't hold off forever, but boasted that
their "victories have been in the deferral of implementation of...regulations."
And now peeling paint turns into poisonous dust, and guess where it ends up?
As a Mount Sinai dean and a Harvard neurology professor put it,
"Lead is a devastating poison.
It damages children's brains, erodes intelligence,
diminishes creativity" and judgment and language and failure.
Yet despite the accumulating evidence, the lead industry didn't just fail to warn people,
but engaged in an energetic promotion of leaded paint.
After all, a can of pure white lead paint had huge amounts of lead,
which meant huge profits for the industry.
But see, there's no cause to worry if your toddler smudges up against lead paint
because those fingerprints can be easily removed without harming the paint.
Wouldn't want to harm the paint. After all, painted walls are sanitary.
You see, as advertised by the Dutch Boy's National Lead Company,
lead helps to guard your health.
The director of the Lead Industry Association blamed the victims:
the slum-dwelling, ignorant parents.
It seems that no amount of evidence, no health statistics, no public outrage
could get industry to care that their paint was killing and poisoning children,
but how much public outrage was there really?
I mean, it goes without saying lead is a devastating, debilitating poison;
literally millions of children have been diagnosed
with varying degrees of elevated lead levels.
Compare that to polio, for example, though.
In the '50s, "fewer than sixty thousand new cases [annually]
created a near-panic among American parents and a national mobilization
that led to vaccination campaigns
that virtually wiped out the [problem] within a decade."
In contrast, despite many millions of children's lives altered for the worse,
"at no point in the past hundred years has there been
a similar national mobilization over lead."
Today, after literally a century, the CDC estimates
over five hundred thousand children still suffer from elevated blood lead levels.
The good news is that blood lead levels are in decline,
celebrated as one of our great public health achievements.
But given what we knew, for how long we knew, to declare this a public health victory?
"Even if we were victorious...it would be a victory diminished by our failure to learn
from the epidemic and take steps to dramatically reduce exposures
to other confirmed and suspected environmental toxicants."
That's one of the reasons I wanted to do this video series on lead.
We need to learn from our history, so the next time some industry
wants to sell something to our kids, we'll stick to the science.
And, of course, lead levels aren't declining for everyone.
I'll cover the Flint Michigan crisis, and end by talking about
dietary interventions to pull lead from our bodies...next.