Little Pamphlets and Big Lies: Federal Authorities Respond to Childhood Lead Poisoning, 1935–2003

Abstract

Late in 1935, Alice Hamilton, who a generation earlier had done more than any other government-sponsored researcher to expose and ameliorate industrial lead poisoning, wrote to Martha May Eliot, assistant chief of the U.S. Children's Bureau. 1 A young friend of Hamilton's, a new mother married to a third-year medical student at Harvard, had asked Hamilton how to be sure that paint on baby furniture was lead-free. Although Hamilton had always assumed "that furniture and toys were painted with enamel paint, lead-free," the Bureau of Standards informed her that in fact many enamel paints contained lead. Hamilton's purpose in writing Eliot, then, was to urge "that tests would have to be made of furniture paints and toy paints," and to suggest who should take on this task: "Do not you think that it is an important question and that it lies within the field of the Children's Bureau?" No such investigation was ever undertaken by the Children's Bureau, the federal agency charged with advocating for "the welfare of children and child life among all classes of our people." 2 Instead, the Bureau continued to field concerned parents' questions about safe paints, and periodically published leaflets listing the lead content of paints, data provided by the paint manufacturers themselves. If Eliot and others at the Children's Bureau did not see studying lead poisoning as within its field, the lead-using industries had certainly learned it was in their best interests to do so. Recent historical scholarship makes clear that for much of the twentieth century the lead industry dominated lead poisoning research, denied the potential health effects from exposure to lead, and successfully limited the public's knowledge of real harm to its workers and the general public, all in order to continue marketing its "useful metal." 3-6 At the time of this exchange of letters between Hamilton and Eliot, researchers at Harvard Medical School were in their second decade of research into the health effects of exposure to lead, research funded in large part by grants from the Lead Industries Association, a trade organization comprising most lead mining and manufacturing companies. 5,6 And at the University of Cincinnati, Robert Kehoe studied the physiology of lead absorption at the Kettering Laboratory of Applied Physiology, an institution established by and run with funding from GM and the Ethyl Corporation, the producers of leaded gasoline. Kehoe in Cincinnati and Aub and his team in Boston were establishing the standard interpretation of lead poisoning that would prevail for the next 40 years. This contrast between passive government agents and assertive defensive actions by industry had enormous health consequences both inside and outside the lead factory walls. This article focuses on childhood lead poisoning as distinguished from the other two particular modes of lead exposure: occupational and environmental-which might be more accurately termed "universal," since it is the uniform distribution (via leaded water

Comparing Lead Poisoning Risk Assessment Methods: Census Block Group Characteristics vs. Zip Codes as Predictors

“…31 In 1978, the Consumer Product Safety Commission banned the sale of residential paint containing more than 0.06% lead. 32,33 Hence, we investigated various possible housing ages as predictors of BLL. Most importantly, we investigated whether the proportion of housing built before 1940 is an even better predictor.…”