Lead And Your Kids

When Helene and Bruce Tackling found their two-story house in New London, Conn., in December 1989, they called it "our Christmas miracle." It seemed perfect. On the very same street where Bruce grew up, it had two parks nearby, a big backyard and enough space so their 2-year-old, Jessica, and the baby on the way could have their own bedrooms. It needed some renovation, but Bruce was handy with a Spackle knife and the family moved in on March 1, 1990.

Bruce immediately went to work, scraping the old paint off the pantry and sanding the bathroom walls down to the original wood. The place was looking sharp. But within months of moving in, the children had become increasingly demanding and irritable. Nicholas, the new baby, wouldn't stop crying, his voice sometimes locking into a continual eerie scream, "like he wasn't even awake," says Helene. Doctors said it was colic, and nurses told her to feed him bananas and rice. Jessica kept complaining of stomachaches, but checkups found nothing wrong. One day Helene was cleaning out a filing cabinet when she found a pamphlet on lead poisoning, which she vaguely recalled as a disease kids used to get from chewing pencils. But the symptoms listed matched her children's behavior, so she called her pediatrician's office. The nurse said not to worry. "She's not eating paint chips, is she?" the nurse asked. Helene had never seen the kids eating paint chips, and she regularly vacuumed any peeling paint.

But this April, the Tacklings learned that much of what they and most Americans believed about lead poisoning was wrong. Tests showed both Jessica and Nicholas had lead poisoning. They probably got it not from eating paint chips but from fine paint dust-stirred up in part by the renovations Bruce did to make the house just like new and the vacuuming Helene did to make it pristine. Helene consoled herself by thinking they had caught it early enough so doctors could cure her kids. Doctors had to repeatedly tell the disbelieving mother the disturbing news: damage from regular exposure to lead is usually irreversible. It's too early to tell how the lead has affected them, but odds are, Jessica and Nicholas will not be quite as intelligent as they were born to be. "I'm living it every single day, every single day," says Helene. "I just think of this nightmare. I look at my children and wonder what I've taken away from them."

Lead poisoning? Most middle-class parents would have the same reaction as the Tacklings: denial and disbelief. Isn't lead poisoning something that happens only in the ghetto, where poor children eat flakes of paint? On the surface, the incredulity makes sense. The federal government did, after all, ban the use of lead-based paint in 1978, and phase out most lead in gasoline in the 1980s. Kids today on average ingest far less lead than their parents did-and they don't seem to have suffered an epidemic of lead poisoning. There shouldn't be a problem at all, let alone one affecting people in decent houses. Yet the fact is that lead poisoning is now being, called the nation's No. 1 environmental threat to children-not by Greenpeace or Ralph Nader, but by top officials of the Bush administration. To be sure, some liberals of late have excitedly spotted lead as a politically attractive "children's issue." But the new assessment of lead's dangers comes from scientists and public-health officials who have formed two conclusions: first, while government stopped new lead from being poured into the environment, it never actually dealt with the 3 million tons of old lead that line the walls and fixtures of 57 million private American homes. More important, in the past 10 years research has clearly demonstrated that even small doses of lead can slow development and make children less intelligent.

Risky zone:

According to Joel Schwartz, a senior scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency, one out of nine children under age 6 has enough lead in his blood to place him in what scientists now consider the risky zone. U.S. Public Health Service estimates place the figure as high as one in six. In the inner city, approximately one out of two children falls in that range. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control will issue new guidelines in the next few months that contain a dramatic message for doctors and public-health officials: lead is a much more serious hazard than we thought, and families and the government should take action well before children show obvious symptoms. "Lead poisoning is entirely preventable, yet it is the most common and societally devastating environmental disease of young children," says Dr. Louis Sullivan, secretary of Health and Human Services.