Despite Rules, Lead Poison Still a Threat to Workers

Last Oct. 4, Jesus Mendez, was so ill that he had to stop working at a San Diego radiator repair shop. He had been sick off and on for four years but he did not know why, despite being treated by several doctors.

After a social worker suggested that his poor health might be work-related, a lawyer sent him for a blood test. It turned out that Mendez had become a victim of an ailment known since before the birth of Christ--lead poisoning.

Four months after he stopped working, Mendez still has unsafe levels of lead in his blood. There is no telling when he will be able to return to work.

Mendez, 36, said he is depressed and constantly aware of his lead poisoning. “Every morning when I get up I have the taste of lead in my mouth,” he said in an interview. “By the time morning is through it feels as if my head is going to explode.”

Mendez’s situation is all too common. More than a decade after the federal government enacted regulations restricting workers’ exposure to lead, significant numbers of employees continue to be afflicted with lead poisoning, creating serious short-term and long-term health problems, according to recent studies obtained by The Times.

“Over 9,000 reports of high blood lead levels have been received by the California Department of Health Services in the past two years,” said Dr. Linda Rudolph, director of the department’s occupational health surveillance and evaluation program, who just completed one study.

Rudolph said that more than 90% of the reports involved workers “employed in hazardous industries with well-known lead exposures.” These work sites included battery manufacturing plants, lead smelters, brass foundries, gun firing ranges, radiator repair shops and construction, according to reports provided to the health department by medical laboratories.

“Many reports identified workers who were seriously ill or had been hospitalized for treatment of lead poisoning,” Rudolph said. She said 800 workers had enough lead in their blood that serious health problems could result. There were multiple reports on many workers, she said.

Lead poisoning can cause kidney damage, injury to the central and peripheral nervous system and even brain damage in particularly aggravated cases. Lead exposure before or during pregnancy may increase the chance of miscarriage.

Rudolph said that 46% of the affected workers in the California study were Latino and that 78% of those afflicted were in Los Angeles County. The study, she said, represents “just the tip of the iceberg” because many workers are not tested as is required in some situations.

Safety Factors

Preliminary results of another study done by Rudolph and other doctors showed that only 2.6% of California facilities using lead had done environmental monitoring (air testing) and only 1.4% had routine blood testing of workers. This means that nearly 205,000 California workers with potential lead exposure toiled in facilities where no air testing of lead levels has been done, she said.

John Froines, who recently headed a study at UCLA that reviewed 14,000 air samples taken by Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspectors from 1979 to 1985, said the problems described by Rudolph are not limited to California.

“I think there is an epidemic of lead poisoning going on in the United States,” said Froines, associate professor of industrial hygiene and toxicology at UCLA. He said he reached this conclusion based on the UCLA research, the California study and one recently done in New York state. There is no central repository of data on the number of workers nationally afflicted with lead poisoning.

“There have been some improvements in the level of exposure in certain important industries, but the scope and severity of lead exposure is greater than OSHA envisaged when the lead standard was promulgated in 1978,” said Froines, who wrote the federal lead standard at OSHA during Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

Froines said the problem is particularly disturbing because the dangers of lead exposures have been known for so long.

“I think what we’re seeing with lead is a microcosm of what’s happening with occupational health,” Rudolph said. “Despite some progress, we’re seeing large segments of the worker community not benefiting from the work that has been done in the last couple of decades. Lead poisoning is preventable,” she said. In fact, she added, the U.S. Public Health Service “has set a goal of completely ending occupational lead poisoning by 1990. We are a long way from reaching that goal.”

Cleanup Legislation

Last Monday, State Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the Senate Toxics and Public Safety Management Committee, introduced legislation designed to eliminate occupational lead poisoning in California by 1991. The bill would require the Department of Health Services, by July 1, 1990, to establish and maintain an occupational lead poisoning prevention program.

The federal government took a major initiative in 1978 when OSHA announced broad new rules to protect workers from lead poisoning. At the time, the agency said nearly a million American workers were exposed to excessive lead levels on the job and that about 100,000 of them were suffering from some illness directly attributable to those exposures.

The new rules required companies, over a one- to 10-year period, to reduce permissible exposure levels from 200 micrograms of lead per cubic meter of air to 50 micrograms. The OSHA lead standard also requires blood testing of employees working in an area where air samples show 30 or more micrograms of lead per cubic meter of air.

If any test reveals the presence of 60 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood or three consecutive tests show an average of 50 micrograms, a worker must be removed from the job. The worker can return to the job only if two consecutive tests show that the level is under 40.

An unusual provision of the standard protects a worker removed from his job because of a high lead level against loss of pay, seniority or other job rights.

Robert Putnam, a consultant to the Lead Industries Assn., said most companies had come into compliance with federal standards. He said that if there were problems they generally would be found at small companies.

Dr. Philip Landrigan, an occupational medicine specialist at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York, said there has been significant reduction in lead exposures in some industries--particularly battery manufacturing. However, Landrigan and others said that workers in some industries--particularly brass foundries, radiator repair and construction, the latter of which is specifically exempted from the OSHA standard--are exposed to dangerous levels of lead.

Landrigan also said recent research showed workers could be endangered by amounts of lead in the blood smaller than had been believed in 1978 when the OSHA standard was enacted. He said three scientific studies showed that a significant number of children born to women who had 20 micrograms or more of lead in their blood while pregnant had a negative effect on the children’s intelligence. “Twenty micrograms is well below” the current standard, he said.

In recent years, OSHA has issued a number of citations against companies violating the lead standard, agency officials said. For example, last October, OSHA fined Federated Metals of Paramount $202,900 for repeatedly exposing workers to dangerously high levels of lead.

At the time, Frank Strasheim, OSHA’s regional administrator in San Francisco, said the Federated case was part of a disturbing, wider pattern of lead problems in California. “I’m surprised at the severity of the lead-exposure cases we are finding in California, especially in the long-established firms,” Strasheim said.

Issue of Inspectors

Rudolph, Froines and other occupational safety experts asserted that OSHA had too few inspectors to be effective on lead problems. Dr. James G. Dahlgren, a Los Angeles physician who has treated many victims of lead poisoning, said the only hope for many workers was having an aggressive union health and safety representative monitoring conditions in the workplace.

Dahlgren and Rudolph also noted that the federal lead standard does not apply to companies with fewer than 10 workers. Rudolph said many small companies are endangering workers, in some instances perhaps unknowingly. Many Los Angeles County companies told health department researchers that they were not aware of their obligations under the lead standard and fewer than 20% of 300 firms contacted had done any air monitoring, said Dr. Paul Papanek, chief of the Los Angeles County Health Department’s toxics epidemiology program.

Papanek recounted one “horror story” of a worker he had treated while in private practice with Dahlgren. The man had been heavily exposed to lead while working in a Los Angeles battery factory. On five occasions in 1982, the lead in his blood was double the allowable limit and he had to be hospitalized, Papanek said. The man should have been removed from his job by a company physician long before he was, Papanek said, because his overexposures had permanent consequences.

“He can’t remember his kids’ birth dates,” Papanek said of the man’s condition today. “He has great trouble with memory. His wife won’t let him drive. He’s brain-damaged. He’s not going to get better.”

Dr. Ira Monosson of Santa Monica, an occupational medicine specialist, said his patient Mendez is regrettably typical of the way workers develop serious lead problems. Mendez worked as a welder in his native Mexico from 1967 to 1978. In 1979, he went to work at a small radiator repair shop in San Diego. According to his medical records and in an interview, Mendez said that he worked six days a week repairing radiators.

In 1984, he began to experience fatigue, insomnia, loss of appetite and nausea and abdominal pains. He went to a doctor who diagnosed his problem as an ulcer. Over the next four years, his symptoms grew worse: the fatigue intensified, he was often irritable, experienced numbness and tingling in one arm, had severe headaches and trouble remembering things. Mendez saw several doctors but he was never tested for lead in his blood.

“It was really ridiculous,” Monosson said. “Too many doctors don’t know to ask people what they do for a living. Medical schools are terribly remiss,” he asserted.

Used Lead in Work

Mendez and his two co-workers typically repaired eight to 10 radiators a day, according to his medical records. He used lead and lead byproducts most of his day in soldering and welding.

Mendez said that during his nine years at the radiator shop, he used a respirator mask for only 15 days in 1985. “It got dirty and the owner never replaced it,” Mendez said. “So we didn’t use them.”

Monosson said it may take a long time for Mendez’s blood lead level to get down to normal because of the amount of the metal that accumulated in his body over many years of exposure.

Mendez’s lawyer, Mariaelena Davila, called his case “a terrible tragedy.” She currently is involved in a battle over supplemental income benefits that his client is supposed to be receiving.