Environment poisons absorbed from

Lead poisoning, however, can be distinguished from most other environmental threats in two very important ways. First, it is very easy to know how much lead a child is absorbing from the environment, and therefore how great the risk is for that child, simply by testing the child s blood. Second, lead poisoning is preventable. In many cases, we can remove sources of lead from the child s environment and thus reduce the threat of lead poisoning. Even in cases where lead sources cannot be completely avoided, there are a number of reasonable steps that we can take to reduce the threat to our children. 

Lead is widely destributed in the environment, especially in industrial and urban areas, and it is readily absorbed into the mammalian body where it exerts a number of undesirable physiological effects. Its most dramatic action is the inhibition of human red cell 5-aminolaevulinic acid dehydrase activity71), but it also depresses the activities of many enzymes having functionsl -SH groups. Attempts to remove lead from the body using agents such as dimercaptopropanol can result in the formation of lipid-soluble lead complexes that may be carried to the brain and exacerbate the effects of lead poisoning. 

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