Dangers Hang On in the ‘90s

Alaric the Goth was a barbarian to be reckoned with. In AD 410 he marched his rough army into Rome and proceeded to torch the city into a cinder of its former self.

The Romans hardly knew what hit them. Not surprising, according to Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow, since Rome as a society had the mental agility of a bowl of mush due to the effects of mass lead poisoning.

In his 1982 novel, “The Dean’s December,” Bellow links Rome’s fall with the lead-dependent lifestyle of the ruling classes. The toxic metal was a favorite home furnishing. Romans ate off lead dishes using lead forks. They drank wine from lead-lined jugs and bathed in water from lead pipes. They even brushed lead-laced cosmetics over their patrician faces.

But that was a long time ago, and now we know better than to furnish our homes with lead. Right?

Perhaps.

Now stop and answer. Have you ever:

* Drunk from a pewter mug or eaten off pewter tableware?

* Stored food in ceramic bowls bought on a trip to Mexico?

* Served dinner on earthenware dishes bought in an antique store?

* Stored open in your refrigerator fruit juice in its original can?

Also, ask yourself:

* If you live in a home built before 1950, have you ever scraped and sanded the old paint?

* Does your plumbing date back to the early 1970s or before?

* Do you live near a major highway built 20 or 30 years ago? If so, do your children ever play in the dirt outside?

If you answer yes to any of these questions, you or your family may have unknowingly absorbed a potentially unsafe amount of lead. Here’s how:

* Pewter is an alloy of tin made with brass, copper . . . or lead. If it was leaded pewter you ate or drank from, you may have also swallowed some unwanted lead.

* Ceramics and pottery from Third World countries can be improperly fired, and lead in their glazes can leach into foods--especially acidic foods such as citrus fruits and hot sauces.

* That lovely ceramic table setting you found in an antique store could be a lovely source of lead poisoning if you use it for food service. It was not until 1971 that the Food and Drug Administration began regulating lead in U.S. and imported earthenware.

* Although the use of lead-based paint was federally banned in 1978, plenty of older homes still have leaded paint on their walls. Paints from the 1950s and earlier were often as much as 60% lead. Scraping and sanding leaded paint can be toxic if you breath or ingest any of the chips or dust particles.

* Older plumbing (usually defined as plumbing installed before the federal Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974) may have been lead-soldered and could leach lead into household water supplies.

* Lead from the solder still used in some imported tin cans can contaminate foods, especially foods stored open in their original containers.

* And, while air lead levels have dropped dramatically due to government bans on leaded gasoline beginning in 1978, the soil bordering older highways may contain high levels of lead from exhaust generated during earlier decades of vehicle use. Such an accumulation could taint the gardens and yards of nearby homes.

The catalogue of potential in-home contamination goes on: some imported toys (notably from Third World countries) can contain lead in paint and materials; home hobbyists using leading for stained glass can breath in toxic fumes rising from their soldering irons; inks used on many bread wrappers have been found to contain lead, which can flake off if the bags are turned inside out and used for food storage, can contain large amounts of lead.

Unfortunately, the developing minds and bodies of children are at most risk from the effects of lead. Children can suffer permanent mental and physical problems at levels of lead exposure that would be considered safe for adults. Studies in Scotland suggest that even slight amounts of lead in the blood of children can cause behavioral problems such as hyperactivity and aggressiveness.

While there have been few reported cases of childhood lead poisoning traceable to the home in Orange County, local health officials expect the number of reports to rise as parents become better aware of the threat, and lead-screening programs for children go into effect.

“We are anticipating that there will certainly be more reports than we’ve had in the past,” says Dr. Hildy Meyers, an epidemiologist for the county.

From 1987 to 1990, the county received just three reports of childhood lead poisoning, according to Meyers; last year alone there were eight reports--a figure that was posted even before the Centers for Disease Control in October lowered the blood lead limits for children from 25 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood to just 10 micrograms.

Meyers believes that the current handful of reports may not reflect the true scope of the in-home lead threat here in Orange County.

“I’m a little hesitate to declare that we don’t have a problem just because we haven’t really looked very hard (in the past),” she says. “You can’t say there isn’t a problem if you haven’t investigated it.”

Detecting low-level lead poisoning without a blood test can be a tough call for a physician to make. Symptoms can be diverse and non-specific. In the early stages, poisoning victims may experience only flu-like discomfort--sleeplessness, indigestion, headaches, irritation and fatigue.

Likewise, learning problems in children may be attributed to any number of causes, from poor prenatal care to heredity, but seldom is lead poisoning suspected as a primary cause unless a child is specifically tested for the metal’s presence. And what is “lower intelligence,” anyway? How do we really know what a child’s optimum IQ level should be? If lead could be removed totally from our environment, would we perhaps all be a little smarter than we are, as one researcher at Harvard University suggests?

At chronic levels, lead poisoning steps out of the diagnostic shadows as cellular calamity sets in--the brain and kidneys begin to malfunction, muscles throughout the body are damaged leading to wrist drop and other palsies, neurosis is evident. Lead-induced hypertension can trigger strokes and heart attacks. Left untreated, the victim spirals down into blindness, paralysis, convulsions, coma and death.

(Caught in time, lead can be removed from the blood and tissues through a drug-based process called chelation. The patient usually recovers, but there may be some lasting mental impairment, especially among children.)

Chronic lead poisoning from in-home sources remains rare. In many newer areas of Orange County, where homes were built after federal lead controls on plumbing and paint went into effect in the 1970s, structural contamination should be virtually nonexistent. Yet ultimately our safety from the ill effects of lead depends on personal circumstance, not mass demographics.

“We wouldn’t expect the same sort of overall problem (with lead contamination) here in the county as in some Eastern cities with much older housing stock,” explains Meyers. “But that doesn’t mean a particular house or area doesn’t have a (lead) problem.”

A little knowledge and vigilance, say health officials, can go a long way in protecting ourselves and our families from a toxic invasion of our daily lives. It seems a small precaution to take, considering you never know when the leaden enemy might be waiting at the domestic gates.