Recent evidence suggests rules don't go far enough to protect children

Lead in telephone cords. Lead in chocolates and Mexican candies. Lead in children's charm bracelets, necklaces, flashlights and lunch boxes. The United States may run on unleaded gas, but it's far from lead-free.

Not only did our heavy use of leaded gas, paint and lead arsenate pesticides throughout the 1900s add a lead load to our soils that we will continue to track into our homes and to consume in agricultural products for decades, but manufacturers here and abroad continue to use lead to make other consumer products from computers to jewelry, lozenges, pottery and makeup. Lead is cheap. Lead is dense, malleable and resistant to corrosion. Lead lends luster to fake pearls and ceramic glazes, and makes a good stabilizer in soft PVC plastics.

For all its industrial appeal, lead is highly toxic to humans. A systemic toxin, it impairs the functioning of multiple systems in the body, including the reproductive and nervous systems. In both adults and children, severe lead poisoning can damage the brain and kidneys and cause seizures, coma and death.

No one disputes lead's toxicity. Still, given our past and present use of lead, keeping lead out of our hands and mouths and those of our children requires proactive measures and a measure of luck.

Accidental ingestion of lead in dust and dirt in and around homes painted before 1978 continues to be the primary avenue of lead poisoning in children. The lead content of dust and dirt in and around homes located near freeways and old industrial zones is also frequently high as the result of fallout from the use of leaded gasoline. So too the lead load in soils around homes built on old orchard sites as a result of prior use of lead arsenate pesticides. Fortunately, by knowing the age and history of a house, homeowners can make an educated guess as to how likely the presence of lead is, and, where warranted, have the lead levels of painted surfaces, garden soils and household dust tested.

Anticipating where lead lurks in consumer products is trickier, and knowing whether the levels present pose a risk is even more difficult. Some items, like folk pottery and leaded glassware, are proven offenders. But, even with these items, we can't judge their accessible lead content (lead which is likely to rub off onto our hands, or our children's tongues, or to leach into our food and drink) by looking, and manufacturing practices differ country to country and company to company. When it comes to judging the lead content of vinyl lunch boxes, candies and PVC-coated power appliance cords, most of us are out of our league and surprised to learn that these everyday items contain toxic metals.

Humankind has a long besotted history with lead. Despite the association of lead with colic and anemia as early as 200 B.C., the Romans made such widespread use of lead that the Latin name for lead, plumbum, persists in our lexicon today, and lead poisoning addled the brains of many of the famed empire's citizens. Operating smelters that required the labor of thousands of slaves, the Romans churned out leaden cooking pots, wine urns, cosmetics and pipes to transport water (thus the word, "plumbing"). The Romans also made widespread use of sapa, a sweet boiled-down concentrate of grape juice, to preserve and enhance the flavor of their wines and to sweeten many foods. The Romans made the sapa in lead kettles. Because the highly acidic grape juice would cause the lead to leach, the final product, sapa, contained high levels of lead. The Romans ingested so much lead in their water and food that historians believe lead poisoning contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire. Among other things, Nero and Caligula may have been "plumb crazy."

It wasn't until 1996 that the United States completely banned the on-road use of leaded gas (though it had been largely phased out on-road by the mid-1980s), despite warnings as early as the mid-1920s about the potential dangers of the widespread use of leaded gasoline. In 1904, an Australian scientist first established the link between lead paint and lead poisoning in children. By 1921, 20 to 30 countries had banned the use of lead paint. Here in the United States, however, we continued to paint our houses with lead until 1978. Use of lead arsenate pesticides began in the United States in 1892 and continued for 100 years, right through the mounting furor over leaded gas and paint, until the EPA canceled their registration in 1993.

Our flirtation with lead poisoning continues as we choose to regulate rather than ban its use in consumer products, trusting in our ability to identify and enforce maximum levels of lead below which no harm occurs. Certainly, given lead's ubiquitousness in our soils, it would be nearly impossible to institute a "zero tolerance" for lead in agricultural products. Trace amounts of lead are in many foods. The Food and Drug Administration monitors how much lead we are consuming in commonly eaten foods via the Total Diet Studies (also known as the market basket studies) that it conducts four times a year to track the levels of various contaminants and nutrients in food. In addition, the FDA has set guidelines for the maximum amount of lead that can be in candy, ceramic ware, wine and bottled water. "If the products are grossly out of compliance the FDA could take enforcement action," says Michael Herndon of the FDA's Office of Public Affairs.

But our use of lead goes far beyond what we can't avoid. "To say, 'just ban it,' would be a disservice to those consumers who receive benefit from the products lead is used in," says Julie Vallese, director of public affairs for the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. "The better strategy is for us to maintain guidance and surveillance." The commission is charged with protecting the public from "unreasonable risks of serious injury or death" from more than 15,000 types of consumer products.

The commission regulates lead hazard on a case-by-case basis to determine how much lead is accessible to people using or handling a product, and whether this amount poses a health risk. When making a decision, the commission takes into account, as per its Guidance for Lead (Pb) in Consumer Products: the total amount of lead contained in a product, the bioavailability of the lead, the accessibility of the lead to children, the age and foreseeable behavior of the children exposed to the product, the foreseeable duration of the exposure, and the marketing, patterns of use, and life cycle of the product. "The dose makes the poison," says Scott Wolfson, a commission spokesman. "The danger is not the mere presence of lead; the danger lies in whether it can become exposed to the child, to the hands, directly into the mouth, and how much goes into the stomach and into the bloodstream."

Though the commission hasn't the authority to evaluate the lead hazard of products before their release in the marketplace, it can conduct inspections of suspect products, whether produced domestically or imported, and order product recalls where it deems the lead hazard to be significant. Since 2003, the commission has ordered more than a dozen recalls of children's metal jewelry, resulting in 160 million units of jewelry with high accessible lead levels being pulled off the market.

In the early 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set 10 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood as the threshold for lead in children; at blood lead levels less than 10 micrograms, the CDC was reasonably certain that children suffered no detrimental effects. Based upon this threshold, federal regulatory bodies like the FDA and the safety commission calculate how much lead a child can consume without going over the threshold, and to what degree the amount of accessible lead in any given product poses a danger.

Recent studies, however, dispute whether there is any safe level of lead consumption. "There has now been a series of studies that have shown that there is no evidence of a threshold for children," says Dr. Bruce Lanphear, director of the Cincinnati Children's Environmental Health Center. "If we look at children whose highest blood lead levels never exceeded 10 micrograms per deciliter -- so this is relevant for children who have always fallen below the CDC's existing action level -- we see anywhere from a four to a seven-and-a-half point drop in IQ if you look at an increase in blood lead levels from less than one microgram per deciliter up to about 10."

In adults, levels of lead exposure previously considered to be harmless are proving to be predictors of hypertension, strokes, cardiovascular diseases like heart attacks, increased risk of spontaneous abortion and miscarriage, renal disease, cataracts, cognitive failure and tooth decay.

The disparity between the level of lead that current science indicates is detrimental and the accepted threshold built into federal guidelines for lead exposure explains why the Center for Environmental Health in Oakland sued manufacturers and retailers of vinyl lunch boxes containing lead in August 2005, even though the Consumer Product Safety Commission determined that the levels of accessible lead in the lunch boxes posed no risk to children.

The lunch boxes at the center of the lawsuits are made out of soft PVC (polyvinyl chloride) or "vinyl." Vinyl can't hold its form without the addition of a metal to stabilize it. Lead is one of the metals manufacturers can use.

The CEH filed the lawsuits under Proposition 65, California's Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, which allows for citizen enforcement when consumer products contain illegal amounts of chemicals determined by the state to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity. "California law is 30 times more stringent in regards to lead exposure than federal regulations," says Lara Cushing, research director for the CEH. "The federal standards are based on outdated blood lead levels that don't protect against developmental problems in children such as lowered cognitive function, behavioral problems and hearing loss."

On Feb. 15, the CEH announced that InGEAR, the country's third-largest producer of lunch boxes and coolers, had agreed to phase out all use of PVC in its products within two years. "This is simply one that we figured out," says Michael Green, executive director of CEH. "But there's all these different products that are exposing kids to lead that no one knows about except the industry that's making the product."

Until we figure the other products out and eliminate as much chronic low lead exposure from our surroundings as possible, we will continue to compromise the functioning of our children. A study published by the American Association of Pediatrics in 2003 estimated that one-fourth of all children in the United States have blood lead levels higher than 5 micrograms per deciliter.

Where we know to look for lead

The California Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Branch (CCLPPB) lists the following as common sources of lead:

-- Lead-based paint (pre-1978), on houses and painted furniture.

-- Lead-contaminated soil especially near busy roadways or factories.

-- Lead-contaminated dust from paint or soil.

-- Lead brought into the home on clothing from work or hobbies involving the use of lead including: battery manufacturing, radiator repair, construction, soldering, recycling, demolition, painting, working with stained glass, pottery making, target shooting and casting fishing weights.

-- Imported food in cans sealed with lead solder. Look for wide seams.

-- Imported home digestive remedies and cosmetics may contain lead. Examples include: Alarcon, Alkohl, Azarcon, Bali goli, Bint al zahab, Coral, Greta (the FDA warns that Greta is 99 percent lead oxide), Farouk, Ghasard, Kandu, Kohl, Liga, Litargirio, Lozeena, Pay-loo-ah, Sindoor and Surma. The CCLPPB advises that there are many others.

-- Imported or handmade pottery and tableware with leaded glaze.

-- Imported candies or foods, especially from Mexico, containing chili or tamarind. Lead may be in both food and wrappers or pottery containers.

-- Metal costume jewelry including children's jewelry sold in vending machines, children's charm bracelets and necklaces.

-- In addition to the sources of lead listed by the CCLPPB, the FDA warns that progressive hair dyes contain lead acetate and should be kept out of the hands of children. The FDA also advises homeowners to check their plumbing as corroded lead plumbing, lead solder on copper plumbing and brass faucets (which, before 1997, could contain up to 8 percent lead) can leach lead into water.

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