TITLE: Lead can alter personalities, pose lifelong risks. It's still in America's water pipes.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2023/12/02/lead-exposure-poisoning-health-consequences/71764877007/
EXCERPT: One study from the University of Texas found childhood lead exposure was linked to being less agreeable and less considerate among other personality traits.
Researchers looked at 1.5 million U.S. and European participants between 20 and 30 and discovered residents who grew up in areas with higher levels of atmospheric lead were more likely to exhibit neurotic behaviors, even after accounting for socioeconomic status, according to the 2021 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It's difficult to accurately capture an unbiased link between something as ambiguous as personality to lead exposure, but the data indicates an overall "damping down of an individual's potential," said Natalie Exum, an environmental health scientist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "What that's indicating is the neurotoxic nature of lead – especially for children."
Lead exposure can affect every tissue in the body, experts say.
The heavy metal inserts itself in cellular processes common to every single cell type involved in major bodily functions such as bone development, and organs such as the gastrointestinal system, kidneys and eyes, said Dr. Roopa Thakur, a pediatrician at the Cleveland Clinic.
But lead's biggest impact on children is on their neurodevelopment.
Exum said children’s blood-brain barrier, which protects the brain from harmful substances, isn’t fully developed until they're about seven. Heavy metals can move around more easily in blood vessels and enter the brain.
This could cause damage to the brain and nervous system, slow growth and development, and trigger learning and behavior problems.
Lead poisoning is typically gradual, showing up long after a child may have been exposed, said Thakur, who also serves as medical director of the Lead-Free Ohio program, operated by the Ohio chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“The time when kids are actively ingesting or inhaling lead is usually when they’re in infancy, when they’re crawling around and picking up lead dust and ingesting it,” she said. “It’s later when they’re growing and developing that we see deficits or physical manifestations.”
The EPA says there's no safe level of exposure to lead. Even a low level of lead in children’s blood is associated with delayed puberty, decreased hearing, impaired cognitive performance, and delayed postnatal growth, according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
Lead exposure is more harmful to children 6 and younger because their bodies are still developing. Young children are likelier to put contaminated objects into their mouths. But adults can also suffer health issues due to lead exposure, the EPA says, including:
Reproductive problems;
High blood pressure and hypertension;
Nerve disorders;
Memory and concentration problems;
Muscle and joint pain.
The CDC says lead exposure in children is often difficult to see because most people don’t show any obvious or immediate symptoms.
If a parent or guardian suspects a child was exposed to lead, the agency recommends talking to a doctor about getting a blood test, which is covered by public insurance and many private insurance companies.
While signs don’t generally appear until dangerous amounts of lead have accumulated, the Mayo Clinic says that some symptoms in children may include:
Developmental delay;
Learning difficulties;
Irritability;
Loss of appetite;
Weight loss;
Sluggishness and fatigue;
Abdominal pain;
Vomiting;
Constipation;
Hearing loss;
Seizures.
Newborns exposed to lead before birth could be born prematurely, have lower birth weight or exhibit slowed growth.
There is no treatment for lead poisoning, Thakur said.
TITLE: Getting the lead out of the water supply: How one health expert crunched the numbers and prodded the EPA
https://www.statnews.com/2023/12/06/epa-water-supply-lead-stronger-proposal-analysis/
EXCERPT: It’s known that lead in the water supply has severe health effects, including brain damage in children and heart and liver issues in adults. Now the Environmental Protection Agency has released an ambitious and expensive proposal to replace 100% of the lead pipes in water system service lines across the country over the next 10 years. Ronnie Levin, who’s been working on lead contamination issues for 40 years as a former EPA scientist and an environmental health instructor at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, deems it “a good move in the right direction that we haven’t seen in a long time.”
It took some improvement to get there, though. The proposal to strengthen its Lead and Copper Rule, issued on Nov. 30, comes after an earlier and weaker version was presented in October 2022. Levin and her colleague Joel Schwartz, also at the Chan School, reviewed the cost-benefit analysis of that earlier proposal, finding that the benefits attributed by the EPA to lead pipe replacement were significantly underestimated. They published their own cost-benefit analysis, which they believe influenced the EPA to revise its proposal.
The new proposed rule will cost an estimated $20 to $30 billion over the next decade. But rather than address, as the earlier proposal had, a single health benefit to lead pipe removal — the protection of children’s IQ and the future earnings attached — the latest proposal incorporates eight of the nearly 20 health consequences of lead exposure that the EPA has itself enumerated.
Levin and Schwartz published their cost-benefit analysis, incorporating expanded benefits, first online on May 4, and on July 15, peer-reviewed, in Environmental Research. Compared to the original EPA proposal, their analysis pointed to dramatically higher benefits of pipe removal. While the original rule suggested the health benefits would amount to $645 million a year, the new analysis said the health benefits would be $9 billion a year, for a cost of $335 million. The rule, the researchers found, would also bring $2 billion in infrastructure benefit, making the benefit to cost ratio 35:1, compared to the original 2:1.
The government’s new proposal takes these findings into account. Though it still doesn’t include all of the health benefits evaluated by Levin and Schwartz, it included enough to justify a 100% lead pipe removal in a decade.
TITLE: Biden's plan to remove lead water lines may benefit these states the most
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/bidens-plan-remove-lead-water-lines-benefit-states/story?id=105353270
EXCERPT: The Biden administration recently announced a proposal that would require all lead water service pipes to replaced in the United States within the next decade.
The proposal, led by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is an attempt to protect Americans from lead exposure, which can cause severe health issues in children and adults, including developmental delays, kidney damage and pregnancy complications.
There are more than 9.2 million lead pipes throughout the country, but there are certain states that would particularly benefit from the proposal.
Four states -- Florida, Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania -- contain nearly 40% of all lead service lines in the U.S. at more than 3.63 million total, according to an April 2023 report from the EPA.
Dr. Aaron Packman, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University and director of the Northwestern Center for Water Research, said there are two issues in Illinois: one being the government-owned city water infrastructure and the other being the lines people own individually on their properties.
"The issue with the city infrastructure, a lot of it is old ... and it's been under maintained over the last few decades because of decreasing federal funding available for water infrastructure," he told ABC News. "The bigger issue we have now is that lead was widely used to connect the water mains in the street to people's houses."
He continued, "And so there are enormous numbers of these lead service lines, as they're called, that are in people's front yards or coming into their apartment building or school, and it's harder for city governments typically to conduct work on private property."
Residents of Chicago, in particular, would be greatly impacted by the initiative because nearly 400,00 lead water pipes are located in the city -- the most of any city in the U.S. In the early 20th century, an agreement negotiated between plumbers' unions and the lead industry resulted in a requirement of using lead in pipes, "so they're just everywhere," Packman said.
Considering the monumental challenge of replacing so many lines, the EPA has made an exception and is allowing Chicago to take 40 to 50 years to replace its pipes, according to local media reports.
"This is long-term fallout from bad industrial governmental decisions 50-plus years ago," Packman said. "It's larger cities, older cities with older infrastructure and are more densely populated or more built up, all of those factors make this take longer, be more challenging."