Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America's Children

Abstract

In 1996 Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner joined with the New York City Law Department to sift through documents obtained through discovery a the lawsuit the city had brought against the leading manufacturers of lead paint. From these records and extensive interviews with leading figures in research and reform efforts, Markowitz and Rosner convincingly argued in their earlier work, Deceit and Denial (2002), that many leaders in lead production knew the dangers of lead to industry workers and children in homes with lead paint and purposefully set out to deceive the public regarding the safety of lead. Lead Wars and the Fate of America's Children continues this compelling jeremiad, focusing on public health efforts in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to abate lead pollution from gasoline and paint. Markowitz and Rosner summarize repeated scientific studies of lead's effect on children's health that demonstrated a relationship between ongoing neurological and behavioral disorders and early childhood lead exposure. On the basis of this research public health officials continuously lowered the “safe” level of lead in blood from forty micrograms per deciliter in the 1950s to 2.7 micrograms per deciliter by the 1990s. Currently, many experts believe that even the “safe” level of lead in children's blood is too high.