September 6, 2017 – Just before midnight, Tamara Rubin and her friend Carissa Berg Bonham wandered the aisles of an area big box store in Portland, Oregon, armed with a handheld X-ray machine and a smartphone.They were searching for lead.They began with garden hoses. The hoses were high-quality, but some brass fittings and nozzles had high lead content.”Unfortunately, there was an inventory that night and there were tons of employees everywhere telling us not to film,” says Rubin, an independent consumer products attorney.After being evicted from their gardening supplies, they headed for the fishing equipment. It was 11:07 p.m. They streamed their findings continue to exist Rubin's Facebook page: “Lead Safe Mama.”In fact, the sinker weights were made almost entirely of lead.”My husband remembers buying a handful of them for a penny when he was a little boy and chewing on them all day. See the little line on them? You put them in your mouth and bite them. That's what every fisherman does,” says Rubin. Another form of weight, dropline sinkers, has been found to have even higher lead levels, at about 800,000 parts per million (ppm). To put that in perspective, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission says household paints and products are unsafe for youngsters if their surfaces have greater than 90 ppm.”Each one is enough to kill a child,” Rubin says. “If your child swallows even one of these, he or she will have a seizure and die,” she says.Rubin has made it her mission to lift awareness of how widespread lead poison might be and the way easy it's to seek out. Two of her 4 sons suffered lead poisoning when a contractor unsafely removed lead paint from the skin of their home.The powerful neurotoxin is especially dangerous for young children, as it may possibly permanently damage their attention and intelligence. It may cause hypertension, kidney damage and possibly cancer in adults.Children are mostly poisoned by lead paint or lead in water. “It's rare for a child to be poisoned by a consumer product,” says Rubin. “And when that happens, it's very difficult to prove.”But so long as lead stays in products, the chance stays. According to the CDC, no level of lead is secure for youngsters.An ongoing risk
Jennifer Lowry, MD, a toxicologist and pediatrician at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, MO, studies cases of severe lead poisoning in children. In one such case, an autistic child was calmed by holding lead weights attached to fishing rods and rubbing them together. The lead level within the child's blood was 48 micrograms per deciliter, a level high enough to cause immediate health problems comparable to anemia, fatigue, headaches and severe abdominal pain. Lead also causes long-term damage. It permanently damages brain cells, robbing the kid of IQ points and the flexibility to pay attention.
“If you find a child who already has elevated blood lead levels, you're already in a difficult situation,” says Lowry. “The fastest brain growth occurs between 0 and 3 years of age. It will affect how the brain develops fundamentally.”
It's been greater than a decade since a four-year-old boy in Minneapolis died of lead poisoning after swallowing a bit of a bracelet given away with children's shoes. His case prompted Congress to pass latest limits on lead in children's products.
Manufacturers of toys and kids's items must now prove to the Consumer Product Safety Commission that their products have been tested and licensed and are below the legal limit.
Although the law has reduced the variety of cases of lead poisoning from consumer products, the chance stays.
This is because there are not any lead limits for products sold primarily to adults, and that is where children can get into trouble.
So far in 2017, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has recalled wicker furniture, a piano bench, a dining table with a metal top, a toy garden shovel and M&M's brand earrings resulting from high lead levels.
The CDC announced last week that a 9-month-old girl in Connecticut was poisoned in 2016 after her parents bought her a hand-crafted bracelet at an area art market to ease her teething pain. Unfortunately, the bracelet was manufactured from lead beads that had a high lead content of 17,000 parts per million. The child had a lead level of 41 parts per million in her blood, a level high enough to cause anemia.
No warning signals
Rubin says people all the time ask her if there are warning signs that something might contain lead. She says there are not any reliable indicators, comparable to the country of origin.
Researchers agree. Pamela Turner, PhD, studies the connection between health and housing on the University of Georgia.
“Most of the time, you really don't know,” she says. “That coffee mug made in England with glaze on it? I actually had one at a conference that was found to have high lead levels.”
Turner says what Rubin is doing is unusual.
“Consumers can’t get products tested as easily,” she says. “This type of testing is less available.”
For her tests, Rubin uses an XRF gun, short for X-ray fluorescence spectrometer. The device retails for $40,000 to $50,000. Rubin rents one for her “test parties.”
Turner says X-ray fluorescence evaluation is the gold standard for testing, but cautions that Rubin's approach isn't exactly scientific since it involves testing one product at a time, moderately than averaging a bunch of products or items.
X-ray fluorescence evaluation can also't determine how much lead is released from a product. Lead is barely dangerous whether it is released from a product and inhaled or ingested, says Tom Neltner, director of chemicals policy on the Environmental Defense Fund.
Rubin often takes the identical view. She says that even when she finds an object that has a whole lot of lead in it, it doesn't necessarily mean the lead is moving into the body or making someone sick. But it's there.
And she doesn't claim to be conducting scientific studies. She says she's just attempting to make people aware of how much lead is within the things around them.
Her work also has one other vital goal: to let people know that for each lead-containing product she finds, there are safer alternatives. In the fishing weights section, for instance, she also finds lead-free weights manufactured from steel and zinc.
Among the numerous products she has tested, Rubin has found lead in popular brands of eco-friendly baby bottles and sippy cups, vintage tableware, old books, modern painted pottery, enameled forged iron pans, lead crystal, ammunition, faux pearls, commemorative drinking glasses, costume jewelry, leather sofas and even trumpet mouthpieces.
In a recent test of 31 forms of fidget spinners, the favored spinning toys, Rubin found that almost half had higher levels of lead than is legally allowed in products sold to children. Most troubling, she says, was that there was no method to tell which spinners contained lead and which didn't. The problem was often a middle wheel manufactured from highly leaded brass.
“It’s right where you put your fingers,” says Rubin.
“They're marketed to kids with autism and ADHD and special needs,” she says. “The first thing my kids do is twist it and put it in front of their mouth.”
She recalls a mother in St. Louis whose child suffered from unexplained lead poisoning. State health department inspectors couldn't find the cause. Rubin says she spent a day in the lady's “spotless” home, patiently testing all the pieces they might consider.
The woman owned a big, latest leather sofa with three seat cushions. The middle cushion tested positive for lead. The remainder of the couch was negative.
“It's that random. Someone used lead in a batch of leather that was tanned. The others didn't,” she says.
When leather is contaminated, it is normally resulting from a chemical called lead acetate, which is used to tan and dye leather and vinyl. Lead acetate has a sweet taste that entices babies and young children to suck and chew on the toxic substances.
In 2009, the Center for Environmental Health, a personal nonprofit organization, began testing handbags and accessories manufactured from synthetic leather. In 16 of the 21 stores they visited, they found lead within the products. After their findings made headlines, lots of of manufacturers signed a settlement agreeing to remove lead from their products. That helped, but didn't solve the issue. In follow-up tests, the group continued to seek out handbags, shoes and belts with high levels of lead.
Yellow and green products were most probably to have high levels of lead, says Judy Braiman, president of the Empire State Consumer Project, a nonprofit that conducts lab-testing of consumer products for lead and other heavy metals. They conducted among the tests for the Center for Environmental Health project.
Lead acetate can be present in some men's hair dyes that bleach gray hair. This yr, a coalition of consumer groups filed a petition with the FDA asking the agency to ban lead in hair dyes. The petition cites cases of men experiencing numbness and tingling of their hands and feet, hypertension and hair loss after using lead-containing dyes.
Food may contain lead. Earlier this yr, the Environmental Defense Fund found that 20 percent of baby formula and juice had detectable levels of lead. And a brand new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation underscores the danger that imported candy and condiments pose to children.
The best method to stay secure, Rubin says, is to be higher informed.
“Stop being a consumer without being sure something is safe,” she says, advising her readers to do as much research as possible about products before buying.
Her other advice is to purchase easy things.
“Buy things that are plain and unadorned,” she advises. “Your pans don't have to be red. Buy clear, plain glasses and plain plates that aren't decorated.”
But buy these easy things latest. “Throw away anything old. Anything older than 40 years probably contains lead.”