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How did lead get there?
lead paint and automobile exhaust
For many decades, companies that made and sold lead products aggressively promoted the use of lead-based paint for the interiors and exteriors of homes. At that time the public perceived that "white lead", which could be tinted a variety of colors, was the best protective paint coating for homes. White lead was available in abundant supply as well. Families used lead paint not only on walls, but on cribs, toys and furniture as well.
Infants and toddlers routinely place non-food objects in their mouths as a part of normal development. It is not surprising that cases of lead poisoning in children caused by ingestion of lead paint began to appear in the English language medical literature before the turn of the century. In 1897, Australian researchers identified lead in paint as the cause of a "Toxicity of Habitation." The first U.S. case was reported in 1914. By 1917, U.S. medical authorities had established that childhood lead poisoning from lead paint was a common problem. "A child," wrote a medical commentator in 1924, "lives in a lead world."
Most lead used in the early 1900s was based on lead carbonate, known as "white lead". The product was manufactured by subjecting lead to corrosion, yielding a white powder. After some processing, the powder was sold as "dry white lead" to paint manufacturers or was ground with linseed oil and sold as paint.
After 1922, another important source of domestic lead wafted into the child's world: lead from automobile exhaust. When scientists discovered that a small amount of tetraethyl lead added to automobile fuel significantly improved performance and efficiency, the lead industry launched a campaign of medical research and political arm-twisting to assure that lead, this "gift of God," would not be restricted. Despite warnings from a Yale University physiologist that poisonous dust from exhaust fumes would fill U.S. cities, the industry view prevailed. During the next half-century, about 7 million tons of lead were churned into the air from automobiles while industry-funded medical experts asserted that lead exposure was "harmless" and "normal."
Even though most of the industrialized world moved to control white lead paint by the turn of the century and curtailed its use soon after World War I, U.S. policymakers ignored medical and industrial labor reports from home and abroad. The lead industry proceeded to gain control over the conduct of medical research, the setting of public health priorities and the dissemination of information to warn the public. Through a trade association, the nation's lead producers, refiners and manufacturers disputed claims of lead poisoning and worked actively to discount such reports and to thwart regulation. When competition from non-toxic paints became a problem in the 1930s, the association by-passed the marketplace and worked to assure that lead paint would be required in public housing projects and other public buildings, including schools.
The sheer weight of the number of dead bodies of acutely lead-poisoned children began to stir pediatricians and legislators into action in the 1950s, but federal regulation of lead paint was another two decades in coming. Today, despite significant restrictions on the use of lead in paint and automobile fuel, children still live in a world full of lead and millions of them continue to be poisoned by their homes, schools, playgrounds and local industry.
Please contact us with any questions or if you'd like to explore your legal rights.
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