=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #214
—January 3, 1991—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
==========
The Back issues and Index
are available
here.
The official RACHEL archive is here.
It’s updated constantly.
To subscribe, send E-mail to rachel-
weekly-
request@world.std.com
with the single word SUBSCRIBE in the message. It’s free.
===Previous Issue==========================================Next Issue===
LEARNING FROM A NATIONAL SCOURGE.
As we saw last week, 88% of American children younger
than six have sufficient lead in their blood to retard their
mental, physical and emotional development. What can we learn by
examining the details of this remarkable situation? At least
these things:
1) Pollution is likely to harm children and fetuses more
profoundly than it harms adults. Therefore, standards should be
set to protect children and fetuses not, as is the case today, to
protect adults.
2) In the U.S., serious pollution has a strong racial and class
aspect: as we shall see, the most seriously poisoned children are
very likely to live in families that are poor and non-white.
3) The federal government has recognized for more than 20 years
that such children are at risk of mental and physical
retardation, yet has not provided protection; it seems to be true
that it is the unwritten policy of our federal government to
poison the children of poor, non-white families.
4) Pollution is continually being found to be more dangerous and
more damaging then previously thought. Officials start by
assuming that there is little or no problem; as evidence of
damage accumulates, officials grudgingly change their views and,
even more slowly, allowable exposure limits are then tightened–a
process that can span decades after the evidence is collected.
This approach to public health requires substantial numbers of
humans to be damaged before health authorities can act. We need a
new approach–one that sets out to protect humans before damage
occurs.
The easiest and cheapest solutions to lead contamination have
already been tried, to little avail. Now government, industry and
the public must come to grips with the need for more profound
solutions, solutions which will very likely conflict with some
traditional American habits and beliefs.
1) Lead is a soft,
bluish-grey metal widely used by industry; by its nature, it is
toxic to humans and other forms of life. In young or unborn
children, at very low levels, lead reduces height, weight,
circumference of chest and head; damages hearing; reduces the
body’s ability to manufacture an essential component of red blood
cells (called heme); causes hyperactivity; interferes with an
important blood enzyme (called erythrocyte
pyrimidine-5′-nucleotidase); interferes with the body’s use of
vitamin D.
Children are particularly susceptible to lead’s toxic effects
because they absorb lead from their food more readily than adults
do; children absorb 50% of lead in their food, whereas adults
absorb only 8% to 15%. Lead crosses the placental barrier,
passing from a pregnant woman’s blood to the blood of the fetus;
red blood cells of fetuses attract and hold lead more readily
than do red cells of adults. Children do not get rid of blood
lead as readily as adults do; the half-life (time for the body to
excrete half of some amount) of lead in blood of adults is 36
days; in children it is 10 months.
A child’s normal rate of metabolism (energy use), and of
breathing, are higher than an adult’s, which enhances lead uptake
from air, food, water. Because children are growing, they need
good nutrition more than adults do; and because children are not
careful about their diets, they are most likely to have
nutritional deficiencies, which enhance the toxicity of lead.
2) The lead problem affects children of every socio-economic
background, but the poor and the non-white suffer most. According
to the best information available today, the poisoning of
children begins when they accumulate 10 micrograms per deciliter
lead in the blood [micrograms of lead per 10th of a liter of
blood], and in some cases even less; unfortunately, the federal
government has not published data on the racial and economic
background of such children. We do have data, however, for
children with 15 or more micrograms per deciliter (as of 1984).
Among families income less than $6000 per year: 27.4% of white
children have more than 15 micrograms per deciliter, but among
African-American children 61.6% from such families have 15
micrograms per deciliter lead in their blood. As income rises,
the percentage of poisoned children drops, but the disparity
between whites and African-Americans continues. With family
income between $6,000 and $15,000 per year, 15.8% of whites have
elevated blood lead, but 36.9% of African-Americans have such
levels. When income exceeds $15,000, 7.5% of white children have
15 micrograms per deciliter or more, but among African-Americans
31% have such blood-lead levels. Overall, 11.25% of white
children have 15 micrograms per deciliter or more; among
African-Americans, the overall total is 44.5%. (Data from the
study we call ATSDR 1, pg. I-12, cited fully last week in RHWN #213.)
These data actually underestimate the severity of the racial and
poverty aspects of the lead problem because they do not include
Hispanic children and they do not include rural children. Authors
of the ATSDR 1 study (pg. I-11) estimate that the total number of
American children with blood lead levels of 15 micrograms per
deciliter or higher is between 3 and 4 million.
3) In 1970 the President’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ)
wrote in its annual report (pg. 200): “Estimates of the number of
children in the United States with dangerous blood lead levels
range as high as 400,000.” Obviously this estimate was low by a
wide margin, but it shows that the Surgeon General and other
health authorities had their eyes open in 1970. The U.S. Congress
officially recognized in 1971 that lead was a particular hazard
to children–especially non-white and poor children–when it
passed the Lead-Based Paint Poisoning Act of 1971. Since then,
the government (the President, EPA and Congress) has managed to
let the situation deteriorate until today there are some 19
million children in the U.S. under age six with more than 10
micrograms per deciliter lead in their blood. The current (1989)
estimate is that there are 400,000 fetuses exposed to excessive
lead each year. It is not possible to argue that government
didn’t know this was a problem needing serious attention. They
knew and they let it worsen anyway.
4) So long as we persist in allowing our children to be exposed
to poisons until harm can be proven, we will end up just where we
are today: discovering too late that our children have been
poisoned. We must revise our thinking. We must prevent poisoning
before it occurs. This will require us to adopt a philosophy of
zero discharge–no one should be exposed to strange chemicals
(let alone to known toxins like lead) because we should assume
that strange chemicals are not good for humans or other forms of
life. Chemicals should be deemed dangerous until proven
otherwise. (The nation has already adopted this philosophy toward
pharmaceuticals; we should now apply this view to all chemicals.)
The burden of proof should be on those who would expose us to
toxins–it should not be up to us to prove we have been damaged
before we can successfully argue for an end to toxic exposures.
In the case of lead, which has already massively contaminated the
environment, we should consider novel ways to prevent new
contamination. Congress has already limited the use of lead in
gasoline; a gallon of leaded gasoline can legally contain no more
than 0.1 grams of lead; a gallon of “unleaded” gasoline can
legally contain only half this amount (0.05 grams). However, if
all the gasoline produced in 1987 (110.5 billion gallons) met the
standard for “unleaded” gasoline, the environment would still
receive 12.2 million pounds of lead from this one source. Under
the rule of zero discharge, this would cease entirely, as it
should.
The largest single source of lead in the environment is the ash
from municipal solid waste incinerators. EPA is waffling on this
issue. Their own publications point to incinerators as the major
source of lead entering the environment, yet the agency is
unwilling to call a halt to this technology, and the agency is
unwilling to recommend that manufacturers be required to phase
out lead from all products that cannot be recycled. This
represents a grave failure of government to protect the people.
Our children’s health is at stake. Our national security is at
stake.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: children; race; lead; health effects;
statistics; income; ceq; studies; lead-based paint poisoning act;
gasoline; ash; MSW; incineration;