THE HEALTH HAZARDS OF LEAD

It has long been known that lead is a poison; this was obvious from the diseases afflicting printers in the days of the letterpress with leaden type.

Children are more vulnerable to airborne lead than adults, mainly because of quicker breathing, but there is, above all, one significant effect that is produced by a trace amount of lead, however small, in the blood of children, but not usually by the same amount of lead in the blood of adults. It is an effect well known to the shysters of the environmental organizations, and consists in inflaming the emotions of those who reject all rationality as soon as they hear the word "children."

However, we must say that the environmentalists were not the only ones to bring in irrelevant testimony. Assorted refiners, blenders and petroleum companies must have studied our July editorial "Why industry will lose on the Clean Air Acts" most carefully, for they followed it with stunning precision as they went down to defeat. Imagine: While the scaremongers wail to the high heavens about America's children being poisoned by the profit-greedy oil companies, the petroleum flaks, or some of them, arrive at the hearings with data on energy savings, balance of payments, and economic benefits. (When it comes to the US balance of payments, you wouldn't mind your kids getting a little lead poisoning, wouldya?)

The most important of several culprits is the pigment in paint in old houses, and there is a large body of evidence that the most important factor in the decline of the blood lead level is simply the gradual disappearance of old houses. One such study, performed on Baltimore children treated for high blood lead levels, followed their progress for up to two years after their release from hospital. There was a striking difference between the children who moved to new housing and those who returned to the ghetto (often to suffer a relapse). The latter are the children for whom the country will have less money available because it will be wasted on removing the unimportant part of the hazard. These are the children who are of no use to either the Sierra Club's highfalutin rhetoric or to the EPA's image polishing.

Conversely, among the evidence that lead in gasoline has little effect on blood levels is a West German study which compared the lead blood levels just before, and up to two years after January 1976, when a law reducing gasoline lead by more than 50% went into effect. The change was never more than 10%; there was no change in 40% of the men and 45% of the women, and there were the usual oddities such as occasional increases in the blood lead level. There was very little change among, of all people, taxi drivers.