Lead And Your Kids

In a nation that bans food colorings because they may harm one person in a million, the concept that one out of nine children is adversely affected by lead seems hard to believe. Is it possible that so many of our children are brain damaged? Obviously not. But several hundred thousand of them have absorbed enough lead to significantly slow their minds and alter their behavior. Roughly 2 million others have slightly elevated blood-lead levels without obvious symptoms or intellectual damage. The lead industry argues that scientists still have not proven that small doses of lead really damage kids. But they agree with public-health officials that parents can greatly reduce the risk of any harm by taking a few simple steps (page 46). Chief among them is changing the way they think about the paint on their walls.

The lead problem persists because lead paint persists. Paint manufacturers removed much of the lead from paint in the 1950s. But the failure of the government to address lead hazards in housing-and the unwillingness of interest groups to push them-has meant that most of the paint remains in the same houses that got coats 40 or more years ago. Seventy-five percent of all private housing built before 1980 has some lead paint, according to a 1990 report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Middle- and upper-income families are as likely to have lead paint in their homes as the poor, the report found, and homeowners were as likely to have it as renters. The mere presence of lead-based paint doesn't harm children, but HUD reported that 20 million of those leaded houses have too much lead dust or chippings-about 20 percent of the entire housing stock-and 3.8 million of those homes had children living in them.

Two of those children were 4-year-old Nicholas McFadden and his older sister Chrystal Files of Baltimore. Chrystal almost certainly got lead poisoning from living in a run-down apartment when she was 4 years old. Their mother, Stephanie Poole, found another apartment that, she says, looked safe: smooth walls, intact baseboards. But she didn't know to look for paint dust or tiny loose chips, which were plentiful on the windowsill in Nicholas's playroom. Within a year of moving in, Nicholas had severe lead poisoning.

Poole now has to observe the consequences. Last month she stood anxiously in the hallway at the Kennedy Institute in Baltimore, afraid to look in the room where Nicholas was undergoing a painful treatment called chelation, which uses injections to cleanse the blood of some lead. When Chrystal entered first grade last fall, Stephanie watched as the other kids whizzed through drills on vowels and consonants, while Chrystal gazed blankly out the window. She is far behind the other kids in spelling and math. "I'm hoping she's just slow," Stephanie says, tears welling, "and there's not something wrong with her."

Only in the past decade have researchers focused on how lead damages development, even when kids don't show obvious medical symptoms. In the 1970s, the CDC defined lead poisoning as occurring when a child had 30 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood (30 jig/dl), the level at which problems like anemia, stomach ailments and noticeable learning troubles appear. But a 1979 study by Dr. Herbert Needleman, then a physician at Children's Hospital in Boston, found that asymptomatic working-class children in Chelsea and Somerville, Mass., who had higher lead residues in their teeth performed worse on IQ and development tests than those with less lead. A subsequent follow-up study showed that children with lead levels equal to 25 to 35 jig/dl were six times more likely to have reading disabilities and seven times more likely to drop out of high school.

The Needleman study was one of the first that tried to factor out other possible explanations such as family stimulation and parental IQ, and it triggered a wave of research on low-level effects of lead. A 1987 study of 249 mostly middle- and uppermiddle-income infants in the Boston area reported that those exposed to 10 to 25 ug/dl of lead in the womb lost four to six points on developmental tests measuring memory, learning and tasks like putting pegs into a board or naming parts of a doll. A 1987 study of 501 children in Edinburgh, Scotland, found that those with average blood levels of 11 ug/dl suffered similar intelligence losses, while another Scottish study reported that children with slightly elevated blood-lead levels were more likely to be considered hyperactive or aggressively antisocial by their teachers. Other studies have linked low-level exposure to hearing loss, slower reaction time, reduced attentiveness, delays in the age at which children first walk and problems with balance. In part because of these studies, the CDC in 1985 lowered the definition of lead poisoning to 25 ug/dl, where it remains. The CDC is planning to draw new warning lines below that number, advocating family or community action between 10 to 25 ug/dI. It has not yet decided what level should be labeled lead "poisoning...... The more we learn, the more toxic we find it to be," says James Mason, head of the U.S. Public Health Service.