Lead poisoning has become a major health issue in the US with new figures suggesting 1 child in 38 now has blood poisoning. Significantly, the children most affected are among the poorest in the country.
Last year the US government reduced the threshold for measuring lead poisoning and the upshot has been that the number of children thought to be affected by lead in the blood has almost doubled.
The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) carried out the research, testing the blood samples of more than 1600 children. The CDC has suggested that around 4 million households in the States may be contaminated with lead.
Lead poisoning can cause problems in brain development, leading to a lower IQ. It can also affect the kidneys and nervous system, and impair hearing. Detoxification is sometimes required in the most severe cases. Lead has been removed from paint, petrol and other sources but is still present in airborne pollution.
Campaigners are now calling for increased testing and greater preventative measures to protect the most vulnerable children from lead poisoning. However, federal funding for such programs has been cut recently.
The CDC believes that the majority of children who get lead poisoning do so because they live in a polluted environment such as a dilapidated home where paint chips and dust can enter the body easily. Dust from industrial areas and soil contaminated with petrol once loaded with lead are also thought to be to blame.
The new threshold for lead poisoning in the US has been reduced from 10 micrograms of lead per decilitre of blood to 5 micrograms. The CDC used the new standard to calculate that more than half a million children in the US are suffering from lead poisoning with the majority of those children from poor or African-American households.
The US banned lead from household paint in 1978 and from petrol in the late 1980s.
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