The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provides access to information on a variety of topics related to the environment and strives to inform citizens of health risks. The EPA also has an extensive library network that consists of 26 libraries throughout the United States, which provide access to a plethora of information to EPA employees, scientists, and researchers. The EPA implemented a reorganization project to digitize their materials so they would be more accessible to a wider range of users, but this plan was drastically accelerated when the EPA was threatened with a budget cut. It chose to close and reduce the hours and services of some of their libraries. As a result, the agency was accused of denying users the “right to know” by making information unavailable, not providing an adequate strategic plan, and discarding vital materials. This case study explores the background of the digitization project, the practices implemented, and the critiques of the project.

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The Environmental Protection Agency

Lead toxicity is an important environmental disease and its effects on the human body are devastating. There is almost no function in the human body which is not affected by lead toxicity. Though in countries like US and Canada the use of lead has been controlled up to a certain extent, it is still used vehemently in the developing countries. This is primarily because lead bears unique physical and chemical properties that make it suitable for a large number of applications for which humans have exploited its benefits from historical times and thus it has become a common environmental pollutant. Lead is highly persistent in the environment and because of its continuous use its levels rise in almost every country, posing serious threats. This article reviews the works listed in the literature with recent updates regarding the toxicity of lead. Focus is also on toxic effects of lead on the renal, reproductive and nervous system. Finally the techniques available for treating lead toxicity are presented with some recent updates.

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Lead toxicity: a review.

Lead poisoning is a serious hazard for children and causes significant biological and neurologic damage linked to cognitive and behavioral impairment (Bellinger 2008a, 2008b). The level of lead exposure has fallen dramatically over the past 30 years because the lead content has been reduced in gasoline, household paint, food canning, industrial emissions, water lead, and other sources, and because public health and housing initiatives have targeted the problem. According to the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES), a population survey administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the geometric mean for blood lead levels (BLLs) for children 1–5 years of age fell from 14.9 μg/dL in 1976 to 1.7 μg/dL in 2006 (CDC 2007b). The number of children 1–5 years of age with BLLs at least 10 μg/dL has fallen from an estimated 13.5 million to 174,000 over the same period (NHANES 2003–2006). Although the 1- to 5-year age grouping is useful for comparison over time, I focus on a cohort of children ≤ 6 years of age in which there are an estimated 194,000 children with BLLs at least 10 μg/dL.

Recent research has indicated that significant neurologic damage to children occurs even at very low levels of exposure (Bellinger 2008a, 2008b; Chen et al. 2007; Lanphear et al. 2005). Preventing these levels of exposure in young children will require controlling a significant and persistent cause of lead poisoning: lead paint used in housing before its ban in 1978. Although pre-1950 house paint has the largest concentration of lead-based paint hazards, house paint produced in 1950–1978 also contains substantial lead content. Poor, urban minorities disproportionately reside in housing units containing lead-based paint hazards, creating significant inequity in health and neurologic outcomes by ethnicity and socioeconomic status (CDC 2004). Because the costs of lead paint abatement are nontrivial and the removal must be done on a unit-by-unit basis (rather than imposed at an industry level), there must be substantial commitment to further reduce lead poisoning among vulnerable children.

A growing body of literature has detailed the economic costs and risks of lead poisoning, including several analyses summarizing these costs and setting them against the estimated costs of lead paint hazard control. However, recent research has broadened still the scope of our understanding of the societal costs of lead poisoning. For example, new studies have begun to analyze the correlation of lead poisoning with crime rates and their associated costs, as well as linking early lead exposure to adult-onset health problems. In this article I aim to comprehensively address the costs and benefits of household lead hazard control vis-a-vis new discoveries in the medical, psychological, and economic literature. I focus on children ≤ 6 years of age, because lead exposure is the highest for this age group, and this is the period when lead exposure produces the most significant damage.

In this analysis, I constructed an upper and lower bound on the cost-effectiveness of strategies to reduce lead exposure. The reasoning behind this methodology is that there is no single estimate that accurately reflects either the costs or benefits of lead hazard control. On the costs side, the actual expense of reducing lead paint hazards in affected homes varies with the extent of interventions required. On the benefits side, the number of children with lead exposure ranges from those reported in state child blood lead surveillance data to those determined from weighted estimates of national surveys. Although several factors could make one extreme or another more credible, it is likely that the truth lies within this interval.

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Childhood lead poisoning: conservative estimates of the social and economic benefits of lead hazard control.

Incidence of EBL (blood lead ≥10 μg/dL) for children aged ≤1.3 years in Washington, DC increased more than 4 times comparing 2001−2003 when lead in water was high versus 2000 when lead in water was low. The incidence of EBL was highly correlated (R2 = 0.81) to 90th percentile lead in water lead levels (WLLs) from 2000 to 2007 for children aged ≤1.3 years. The risk of exposure to high water lead levels varied markedly in different neighborhoods of the city. For children aged ≤30 months there were not strong correlations between WLLs and EBL, when analyzed for the city as a whole. However, the incidence of EBL increased 2.4 times in high-risk neighborhoods, increased 1.12 times in moderate-risk neighborhoods, and decreased in low-risk neighborhoods comparing 2003 to 2000. The incidence of EBL for children aged ≤30 months also deviated from national trends in a manner that was highly correlated with 90th percentile lead in water levels from 2000 to 2007 (R2 = 0.83) in the high-risk neighborhoods. These effec...

Elevated Blood Lead in Young Children Due to Lead-Contaminated Drinking Water: Washington, DC, 2001−2004

The food and water we consume are often contaminated with a range of chemicals and heavy metals, such as lead, cadmium, arsenic, chromium, and mercury, that are associated with numerous diseases. Although heavy-metal exposure and contamination are not a recent phenomenon, the concentration of metals and the exposure to populations remain major issues despite efforts at remediation. The ability to prevent and manage this problem is still a subject of much debate, with many technologies ineffective and others too expensive for practical large-scale use, especially for developing nations where major pollution occurs. This has led researchers to seek alternative solutions for decontaminating environmental sites and humans themselves. A number of environmental microorganisms have long been known for their ability to bind metals, but less well appreciated are human gastrointestinal bacteria. Species such as Lactobacillus, present in the human mouth, gut, and vagina and in fermented foods, have the ability to bind and detoxify some of these substances. This review examines the current understanding of detoxication mechanisms of lactobacilli and how, in the future, humans and animals might benefit from these organisms in remediating environmental contamination of food.

Bioremediation and Tolerance of Humans to Heavy Metals through Microbial Processes: a Potential Role for Probiotics?

ObjectiveWe reviewed the sources of lead in the environments of U.S. children, contributions to children’s blood lead levels, source elimination and control efforts, and existing federal authoritie...

Alma Padilla

Papers

Lead exposures in U.S. Children, 2008: implications for prevention.