I don’t know. Maybe you’re just getting too overwhelmed with relentless bad news one day after another so you might have missed what occurred last week in Washington. Senator Tammy Duckworth called the vote by Republican congressmen “obscene.” She’s absolutely right. They took money ($125M) that had been allocated to replace lead pipes in the worst locations (IL, MI, NY, and TX) and added it to the ICE fund of $18.7 billion allocated annually to ICE. Read about it here. You’ve got to hand it to these guys. If they could reverse the 13th Amendment, they’d do so in a heartbeat.
Chicago, where you may be sitting right now, sipping coffee that may be ever so slightly sweetened with lead, has the worst lead pipe problem in the U.S.
I prefer the term “lead poisoning” over “toxicity” as there is no acceptably safe level of lead in the human body, just as there is no acceptable level of cyanide or strychnine. Low levels of lead won’t kill you with the swiftness of cyanide, but they will surely damage your health and, critically, that of your children, especially those under six whose physical and mental development can be severely affected.
The history of lead poisoning is pretty gruesome, and I’ll try to condense it for you.
First, lead mainly affects children’s brains. It enters their bodies through water pipes but also because the paint chips are sweet to taste when nibbled.
Fortunately, lead based paints were banned in 1978, but quite a lot of surfaces remain covered with layers and layers of them. Also remember that when business interests are involved and potential victims are helpless children, especially children of color, the depth of deceit and chicanery is bottomless. Here’s a chart showing lead levels by race. You can look up a vintage Dutch Boy Paint comic book from the 1920’s proclaiming, “These walls don’t just look good. They’re yummy, too!”
Although the amount of lead in our environment has dropped over the past few decades, I’m sure you remember that government officials in Flint, Michigan, were found guilty of neglect when it came to testing certain communities (read: communities of color). Charges against them range from willful neglect of duty to involuntary manslaughter. And if you think inept testing was confined to Flint, a report showed 33 cities, including Chicago, regularly cheated on their testing to hide the dangers of the water pipes.
How do humans get lead poisoning?
Lead can enter our bodies by ingesting it, touching it, or breathing it. Children like the sweet taste of lead paint chips. Drinking water is contaminated when it runs through lead pipes or copper pipes soldered with lead. Once inside the human body, lead interferes with virtually every metabolic process we’ve got, which accounts for the broad spectrum of symptoms that result from chronic lead poisoning.
People ask, “Hey, it’s 2026, how could I possibly get lead in my body?” Well, you could be rehabbing an old house that was painted with multiple coats of lead-based paint, you’re sandpapering the wood to its original finish, dust is flying everywhere, and you’re breathing it.
You could be living in an area that had a long-forgotten lead smelting plant that no one ever bothered to clean up.
Your toddler could be gnawing on a brightly painted toy from China.
In 2017, Trump reversed the Obama-era ban on lead-containing bullets. Gun enthusiasts seemed fine with the decision. After googling, “are lead bullets safe?” and apparently an NRA member wrote, “I shoot thousands a week from my AK-15 and I’m fine.” But yes, you certainly can get lead poisoning if you’re a regular at a firing range.
The link between urban violent crime and lead poisoning has been studied and is quite chilling. It originally appeared in Mother Jones magazine and sent a shiver down my spine. It has been theorized that the spate of serial killers in the 1970’s in the Pacific Northwest (Ted Bundy, et.al.) was related to very high levels of toxic metals in the water and air. Here’s an article I wrote on this.
Ancient Issues and Lead
The ancient Romans loved the stuff: pipes, bathtubs, and cooking vessels were all lead-lined. One theory for the decline of the Roman Empire was massive lead poisoning throughout the population. They even sweetened their wine with it. By the way, the Latin word for lead is Plumbum, the basis for the word plumber.
With the start of the Industrial Revolution, lead entered our lives in a variety of imaginative ways. Despite all sorts of warning signs of illness among workers (especially mental illness), lead industry moguls would join the lying ranks of those from the tobacco industry and the radium watch-dial industry, almost always in cahoots with bribed medical professionals to swear their products were safe.
The most dangerous source of lead for US residents in the 20th Century of all ages came when an incredibly toxic product called tetraethyl lead was discovered to work well as a gasoline additive to prevent engine knock. Until the 1970s, the premium petrol pump at every gas station was labelled “ethyl.” The service station attendant (yes, they really existed) would ask the driver “regular” or “ethyl?” Choosing the latter poured lead into your car, the air, our drinking water, and our bodies.
When scientists discovered the toxicity of tetraethyl lead, the producers of lead, a joint venture between Standard Oil and General Motors, wanting to keep their customers buying their “knock-free” engines, spent millions in an attempt to keep the information from going public. Fortunately, they lost during dramatic Congressional hearings, but many forms of lead are still with us today.
The story of the scientist who singlehandedly fought the giants and won is told in this fascinating segment of the PBS Series “Cosmos”, which you can watch here (Season1, Episode 7). These days, everyone would be paid off in BitCoin.
Health Problems and Chronic Lead Poisoning
There are problems when it comes to diagnosing a health issue traceable to chronic lead poisoning.
Symptoms can be very vague and non-specific. Symptoms might be psychological (depression, mania, memory loss in adults, poor learning, lower IQs and ADD in children). They can also be physical, including chronic fatigue, vague digestive symptoms, high blood pressure, susceptibility to infection, peripheral neuropathy, and anemia.
Although there are definite guidelines for testing children for lead poisoning (if you have kids, your pediatrician should do the testing), such guidelines do not exist for adults. The current recommendation is to test those individuals whose occupation places them with possible lead exposure. Of course, such narrow guidance overlooks home rehabbers and auto mechanics (batteries contain lead) and those who don’t know they live near contaminated air, water, or soil.
In other words, neither the doctor nor the patient thinks that chronic lead poisoning is a diagnostic or any toxic possibility, so tests are not routinely ordered or requested.
Here at WholeHealth Chicago, we do order a toxic metal screen on request (usually covered by insurance) and will include one if a patient presents with symptoms consistent with lead poisoning.
If lead is present, the treatment is called chelation therapy (pronounced “ket-lay-shun”) not well known among “adult” medical practices but quite familiar at the large pediatric centers throughout the city. We perform it regularly and if there is evidence of lead toxicity, it can be covered by some insurance.
Next week, I’ll walk you through testing your home, testing your body and getting the lead out.
Be well,
David Edelberg, MD