History of Lead Poisoning

In the seventeenth century, lead was outlawed as an additive to wine in France. In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin wrote about the hazards 

At around the turn of the century, there was increasing concern for the nonoccupational hazards of lead. In Australia, pioneering works by A. J. Turner in 1897 and J. Lockhart Gibson in 1904 concluded that lead paint in porch railings was responsible for lead poisoning in children, and in 1922, the state of Queensland, Australia, banned the use of lead paint for certain dwelling surfaces (Landrigan, 1991). 

Byers and Lord investigated the long-term health effect in children who had experieneed lead poisoning in the 1940s. In 1943, Byers reported on 20 children who had reeovered from acute lead intoxication, noting that 19 of the 20 had behavior disorders or learning disabilities. This marked the beginning of modem lead intoxication studies, which continues at present. 

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Warren C (2000) Brush with Death A Social History of Lead Poisoning. Baltimore, MD Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Markowitz and Rosner, Deceit and Denial, pp. 18—19 Kovarik, Context of Technological Alternatives C. Warren, Brush with Death A Social History of Lead Poisoning (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2.000), pp. 120-123. 

Lin-fu JS Modern history of lead poisoning a century of discovery and rediscovery, in Human Lead Exposure. Edited by Needleman HL. Boca Raton, FL, CRC Press,... 

Publishes "Hour of Lead A Brief History of Lead Poisoning in the United States and the Efforts of the Lead Industry to Delay Regulation. ... 

Stevenson L.G. 1949. A History of Lead Poisoning. Ph.D. Thesis. The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. 

Hu-Howard. Knowledge of Diagnosis and Reproductive History among Survivors of Childhood Plumbism. American Journal of Public Health. 81 (Aug. 1991) 1070-1072. Source for third-generation effects of lead poisoning. 

Treatment of lead-poisoned animals usually involves the removal of ingested lead objects and application of antibiotics. For example, a captive bottlenose dolphin that had 40 lead-containing air pellets in its second stomach, as determined by radiography, was treated with 250.0 mg penicillamine/kg BW given orally three times daily for 5 days after the pellets had been removed from the stomach using an endoscope. Anemia in chimpanzees is sometimes associated with lead toxicity. In one case, a 19-year-old female chimpanzee with a history of excessive menstrual bleeding had a blood serum level of 1.03 mg Pb/L. The animal was successfully treated using oral chelation therapy 2,3-dimercaptosuccinic acid at 10.0 mg/kg BW per os for 5 days, then lO.Omg/kg BW for 2 weeks. 

This document outlines the medical monitoring program as defined by the occupational safety and health standard for inorganic lead. It reviews the adverse health effects of lead poisoning and describes the important elements of the history and physical examinations as they relate to these adverse effects. Finally, the appropriate laboratory testing for evaluating lead exposure and toxicity is presented. 

Second, the requirement of severe Pb exposures in mothers as necessary for lead reproductive and developmental toxicity is not a tenable premise. As noted in later chapters, embryo- and fetotoxicity is quite a sensitive endpoint in humans and occurs at relatively low systemic lead levels owing to ready transplacental movement of lead early in pregnancy (NAS/NRC, 1993 U.S. ATSDR, 1988 U.S. CDC, 1985, 1991, 2005 U.S. EPA, 1986, 2006). The occupational history of lead in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries establishes various adverse reproductive outcomes in pregnant women not themselves demonstrably debilitated by manifest lead poisoning (Legge, 1901 Oliver, 1911 U.S. EPA, 1986, 2006). 

There already exists a large literature on the history of lead and lead poisoning. The extant literature has two strains. One strain is predominantly archeological and scientific, and seeks to identify long-term changes in human lead exposure from the ancient world to the present ... 

Wherever possible manufacturers should be encouraged or required to use substitutes for lead in their products. Markowitz and Rosner (2013) describe the difficulty of this work and provide a detailed history of the U.S. effort to ban lead as an ingredient in gasoline and paint. They explain the role of the LIA to discredit the science of lead poisoning and the scientists involved in its research. The LIA deliberately misled the public about adverse health effects from lead and enlisted the assistance of politicians to protect their interests. The bans on lead in gasoline... 

Metal compounds, particularly compounds of the heavy metals, have a history of importance as antimicrobial agents. Because of regulations regarding economic poisons in the environment they are no longer widely used in this appHcation. Mercury, lead, cadmium, uranium, and other metals have been imphcated in cases of poisoning that resulted in government response. The metals whose compounds have been of primary interest as antimicrobials are mercury, silver, and copper. 

As in 1925, when dozens of workers went insane from tetraethyl lead poisoning, Kehoe was the Ethyl Corporation s key man at a hearing. Patterson was a key critic, and corporate executives looked to Kehoe to give them the ten years they needed. According to the corporation s own official history, Kehoe had the fate of the company in his hands. If he wavered, the company would have been faced with disaster. ... 

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