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190  Get the Lead Out
     The Washington Post  January 17, 1970

     The shameful and preventable tragedy of lead poisoning of young
children living in dilapidated housing has been well advertised in re-
cent years.  The immediate cause is ancient, crumbling paint and putty
from another era. Lead has since been banned from these products for
interior use.  Lead is still used in some poster paints, however, and I
was shocked to hear a paint salesman shrug off the warning label on a
product that he claimed was widely distributed in schools.

     We are also exposed very widely to lead emitted from automobile
exhausts at the rate of 400 million pounds per year in the U.S. as a
byproduct of the use of "lead alkyls" to improve the octane rating of
gasoline.  We have little evidence of population damage from this
source of lead, though there is little doubt that it is a principal
source of the accumulation of lead in the bloodstream and bones of
city-dwellers.  It is mathematically certain that this general 
elevation of environmental lead increases the chance that a child who 
eats lead paint will be pushed over the brink of acute lead poisoning.

     In animal studies, however, the feeding of lead salts has been
confirmed to cause tumors of the kidney, one of the many forms of 
cancer which has been increasing in civilized countries.  Workers in
lead-handling industries have not exhibited an unusual rate of kidney
cancer, so that this particular suspicion is still inconclusive.  
Tetraethyl lead itself is well recognized as an acute poison -- for 
example a case was recently reported of brain injury and psychosis from
sniffing leaded gasoline.  It also included lymphatic leukemia in mice,
according to experiments by Drs. S.S. Epstein and N. Mantel of the
Children's Cancer Research Foundation of Boston and the National Cancer
Institute.  Lead salts, again at high doses, have produced chromosome
breaks and also congenital malformations in experimental animals.
This effect was exaggerated by the simultaneous administration of
cadmium, another air-pollutant metal.

     We cannot reliably translate these experimental results into 
measures of damage to man at the levels we experience from day to day.
To say the least, they can be no basis for assurance or complacency.
The basic thrust of this research is not so new as the revolution in
public attitudes and social policy, that a helpless population should
not be made to bear the involuntary risk of our uncertainties.

     A new wrinkle has been summarized in testimony before an air 
pollution subcommittee of the California legislature.  Donald A. Jensen,
representing the Automobile Manufacturers Association, pointed out
that lead additives complicate the general problem of smog control
quite apart from their own potential health hazard.  He quoted studies
by Ford Motor Co. engineers that "exhaust hydrocarbon emission increased
with mileage considerably more on gasoline with lead compared to
unleaded gasoline."

     The presence of lead also frustrates the development of other 
approaches to controlling emissions from exhausts -- by "poisoning"
catalysts, and clogging and eroding after-burners and exhaust 
re-circulators.

     What more must be known before concluding that the community
could do very well without the use of lead in gasoline!

     Taking it out may cost something -- perhaps to a level of a tenth
of the taxes now collected on gasoline -- for a while, until the
undoubted ingenuity of the petrochemical industry has surfaced with
more economical alternatives.  In these circumstances, it is an unfair
burden on the conscience and reputation of individual oil companies to
wait for any voluntary action on their part that would expose them to
competition within the industry.  We might even find it profitable in
the long run to provide tax incentives to the makers of lead additives
to divert their production, by the same logic as the incentives   
offered to other polluters of the environment.
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