Washington News

Staff at the Environmental Protection Agency have recommended tightening air quality standards for lead.

Today the Office of Air Quality Planning at the Environmental Protection Agency released a final staff paper, Human Exposure and Health Risk Assessment (see it here), and in it they recommend EPA tighten lead standards. The staff basically says that the evidence of lead's health effects, particularly on children, "clearly calls into question the adequacy of the current standard."

The lead standard was developed in 1978. That standard helped get the lead out of gasoline, a major step forward in environmental health policy. The use of lead as a gasoline additive started in the 1920s, and went into hyperdrive in the 1940s. In spite of the 1978 standard, lead wasn't completely removed from gas until 1996. But in the 18-year period in which it was being phased out, the Centers for Disease Control reported a 90% reduction in kids' blood-lead levels. That's good news—a 90% reduction—but it isn't zero, and when it comes to lead, that's the only safe number. As the EPA staff says, "Current health-effects evidence does not indicate a level of lead exposure below which adverse health effects may not occur." They also say, according to a large and fast-growing body scientific studies, that "adverse effects in young children occur at much lower blood-lead levels than was understood when the current standard was set in 1978."

What does the lead do? Well for one thing, lead has been shown in several studies published in the last couple of years to significantly reduce IQ, depending on the dose and the timing of the exposure (high maternal lead exposures in the first trimester of pregnancy, for example, tend to have greater impact than later in pregnancy, and exposures earlier in childhood have greater affect.) It is clearly associated with other mental health problems and behavioral disorders: lead is implicated in ADHD, for example. It is also associated with infertility problems, birth defects, high blood pressure, and renal failure to name just a few of the long list of health disorders and diseases.

The EPA staff paper recommends "appreciably lowering the level of the current primary standard for lead (the current standard is 1.5 micrograms per cubic meter (μg/m3)." A staff recommendation does not mean that the standard will be changed, but it should fuel a dialog that really needs to happen.

Get the lead out—of lipstick

Last week the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics published A Poison Kiss: The problem of lead in lipstick. According to the report, the average woman eats four pounds of lipstick in her life, and some of that lipstick may be very high in lead. For example, LʹOreal's "Colour Riche True Red", which tested the highest of the 33 lipsticks that the campaign sent to an independent testing lab, had 0.65 parts per million of lead in it. At the other end of the spectrum, 13 of the tested lipsticks had no detectable lead in them.

Most people assume that the FDA, EPA, or some other alphabet soup agency, regulates and tests cosmetics, but that assumption is plain wrong. FDA has authority over some coloring agents used in cosmetics, but beyond that, they have very limited authority over the cosmetics' industry. They have never set a limit for lead in lipstick or other cosmetics, yet numerous studies point out that there is no safe level of lead.

The report's findings include:

Lead is a proven neurotoxin that can cause learning, language and behavioral problems such as lowered IQ, reduced school performance and increased aggression.

Pregnant women and young children are particularly vulnerable to
lead exposure because lead easily crosses the placenta and may enter the fetal brain, where it interferes with normal development.

Lead has also been linked to miscarriage, reduced fertility in both men and women, hormonal changes, menstrual irregularities and delays in the onset of puberty.

Lead builds up in the body over time and lead‐containing lipstick applied several times a day, every day, combined with lead in water and other sources, could add up to significant exposure levels.

A 2004 survey of cosmetics use by 5,856 U.S. girls aged 7 to 19 found that 63 percent of the girls aged 10 and younger reported using lipstick.

Check out the report, and let the manufacturers of cosmetics you use know that you don't want toxins in your beauty products!

And More Toy Recalls for Mattel

Well, this morning's news is that Mattel is again recalling millions of toys for lead and magnets. I couldn't quite understand the magnet part of the story, but according to a piece in the Wall Street Journal, "Magnet issues surfaced recently in another toy recall. In 2006, the CPSC issued a similar recall for 3.8 million "Magnetix" sets, a toy produced by Rose Art Industries Inc. of Livingston, N.J. The sets consisted of tiny magnets that, if swallowed by an infant, bonded together in the stomach and caused fatal intestinal perforation in at least one instance. The CPSC documented 34 incidents involving the magnets, including one death and four serious injuries. A 20-month-old boy died after he swallowed pieces that twisted his small intestine and created a blockage."

One of the biggest problems with our global economy seems to be that while it has kept prices down (as Ms. Burnett said on Hardball last week) there have been other hidden costs. At the same time as we were off-shoring the production of almost everything we buy in order to save that few pennies at Wal-Mart, there was general gutting the regulatory agencies that protect us. For example, the Bureau of Consumer Protection, which regulates incoming products such as toys, had actual 2002 revenue of $83 million dollars, compared to actual funding of $47 million in 2005 (the last year for which actual figures are available).

Regulators are there to protect us. In an odd fashion, by doing their jobs, they also protected the regulated: Mattel was expecting a $30 million pre-tax income cut this quarter as a result of the earlier recalls. These subsequent recalls are going to add to the sting.

It's a Funny World, Why Am I Not Laughing

In the last few months we have heard that Chinese products are:

Making our dogs and cats sick. One story I read estimated that 39,000 pets were sickened and several thousand died after eating pet foods prepared with melamine-contaminated wheat gluten. Melamine is a by-product of coal production, and used in plastics as a fire retardant. It is also a member of the cyanide family--which explains its toxicity.

Contaminating toothpaste and cough syrups. Though no one died in the US, there were confirmed deaths in Panama from people using the diethylene glycol contaminated products (some of which did make their way into this country). Diethylene glycol is an industrial plasticizer, and a coolant/antifreeze. It's toxic attributes? They are many, and not for the faint hearted to consider: Nausea and vomiting, headache, anuria, narcosis, cyanosis, tachypnea, tachycardia, hypotension, stupor, prostration, hypoglycemia and unconsciousness, convulsions and death. It can also cause degenerative changes in the kidneys and liver, central nervous system depression, nephrotoxicity, abdominal pain, weakness, respiratory failure, cardiovascular collapse, and acute renal failure and brain damage. Ah, yes, and let us not neglect to mention that somnolence has been reported in children. Personally I don't even know what some of these conditions, listed on the Material Safty Data Sheet for diethylene glycol,are, but I know I don't want to experience them.

Causing a recall of millions of toys. The toys were painted with lead, a known neurotoxicant that has been banned here since 1978 for use in any paints headed toward the consumer marketplace. According to the National Institutes of Health, there are:

1. "No effective clinical interventions" to lower the levels of lead in children's blood once it is there
2. Children are "at risk of adverse developmental effects" at concentration levels of less than 10 µg/dL
3. Children "cannot be accurately classified as having blood lead levels above or below 10 µg/dL because of the inaccuracy inherent in laboratory testing"
4. And finally, "there is no evidence of a threshold below which adverse effects are not experienced"[emphasis added].

Wow, that is all scary. So what is the funny part of the story? Last Friday, on the MSNBC program, HARDBALL, Erin Burnett (the anchor of the CNBC program, STREET SIGNS) said, "[I]f China were to revalue it’s currency or China is to start making say, toys that don’t have lead in them or food that isn’t poisonous, their costs of production are going to go up and that means prices at Wal-Mart here in the United States are going to go up too. So, I would say China is our greatest friend right now, they’re keeping prices low and they’re keeping the prices for mortgages low, too.”

OK, the implication here is that you and I and everyone else in the United States would rather have people in other parts of the world dying from handling these chemicals in the production of our goods, and have our pets die, and have our children and grandchildren suffer the IQ reduction lead is best known for, just so that we can buy pet food or toys for a few pennies less? Huh? I just don't get it. I will say right here, charge me a little more.

A reader gave me the head's up on this story by email. Thanks, Lynn.

Lead in Toys

The latest issue of the Journal Environmental Health Perspectives has an article on how even relatively small exposures to lead can affect kids' learning abilities: "The results show that blood-lead levels far lower than 10 µg/dL in early childhood correlate with lower educational achievement in elementary school as measured by performance on end-of-grade tests," they report. And today there are news reports about the recall of Fisher-Price toys due to lead paint used on some 967,0000 toys of Chinese import, this right on the heels of the June recall of a million and a half more Chinese toys--Thomas the Tank, a wooden train set--for lead in the paint.

How concerned should parents and grandparents be? Well, most environmental health experts agree that lead is quite dangerous, and at least some experts are advising parents whose children may have been exposed should arrange to have them blood tested for lead. In just one example from an article in Forbes, Dr. John Rosen, lead poisoning specialist at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore (NY), is quoted as saying, 'it's better to be safe than sorry.'

Rosen points out, childhood exposures to lead from paint in old homes is more common than poisoning from consumer products, but in either case, we know lead is a toxin. It shouldn't be in kids toys.