Lead Found In Juice And Baby Food

June 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment




A recent test by the Environmental Law Foundation found higher than acceptable levels of lead in both organic and “conventional” juices and baby foods. They filed a notice of violation with a list of which foods were fine, and which ones weren’t. Foods with violations included apple juice, grape juice, packaged pears and peaches (baby food included), and fruit cocktail.

At first glance, it’s shocking to see how many organic brands tested positive for lead. The only organic brand that had acceptable levels was Knudsen, which is also one of the oldest organic juice brands. Where is the lead coming from? It could be coming from the manufacturing plants, from the packaging or from somewhere else. But it could also be coming from the soil. Huh?

As I mention in my book, Organic Manifesto, lead arsenate was used as a pesticide in orchards for over 100 years. While it only takes three years of not applying toxic chemicals to orchards for their fruits to become certified organic, who knows how long it will take for all that previously used lead and arsenic to work its way out of the soil. In the meantime, we are stuck with it.

What are the effects of too much lead? Well, let me just quote the official section of the Children’s Environmental Health Center section on lead:

Lead can affect almost every organ and system in your body. It can be equally harmful if breathed or swallowed. The part of the body most sensitive to lead exposure is the central nervous system, especially in children, who are more vulnerable to lead poisoning than adults.

A child who swallows large amounts of lead can develop brain damage that can cause convulsions and death; the child can also develop blood anemia, kidney damage, colic, and muscle weakness. Repeated low levels of exposure to lead can alter a child’s normal mental and physical growth, and result in learning or behavioral problems.

If you are pregnant, exposure to high levels of lead can cause miscarriage, premature births, and smaller babies. Exposure can cause decreased mental ability, learning difficulties, and reduced growth in the children exposed to lead during pregnancy.

In adults, exposure to lead may be short-term or chronic. Repeated or chronic exposure can cause lead to accumulate in your body, leading to lead poisoning. Lead poisoning can cause metallic taste, poor appetite, weight loss, colic, upset stomach, nausea, vomiting, and muscle cramps.

Short-term exposure to lead can irritate the eyes on contact, and cause high blood pressure, headache, irritability, reduced memory, disturbed sleep, and mood and personality changes. Breathing lead compounds can irritate the nose and throat. Exposure to higher levels of lead can damage the brain; kidneys; reproductive system; blood cells, causing anemia; and the nerves, causing weakness. Exposure may also cause muscle and joint pain, decreased reaction time, poor coordination, and poor memory. Lead is listed as a substance reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen in the Eleventh Report on Carcinogens, published by the National Toxicology Program, because exposure to lead has been associated with lung, stomach, and bladder cancer.

If you think you have been exposed to lead, contact your health care professional.

The good news is that you shouldn’t drink too much juice anyway–or give juice to your kids. It’s much better to drink water and eat an apple than have a glass of apple juice. And while that organic apple still might have a bit of lead in it, you’ll get more fiber from eating it, and will reduce your exposure to lead contamination from the concentrate.

Once again, we can’t go back and undo what has already been done…we can only stop it from continuing. And it is continuing. There is only one way to stop it: Demand Organic! Stop the onslaught of untested toxic chemicals in our lives, our soil, our water, our air, our bodies, our children, and our unborn children.

/end article: reposted from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maria-rodale/is-there-lead-in-your-jui_b_614146.html

Filed Under: Lead Poisoning Tagged With: , ,

Scientist: “No amount of lead safe”

June 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment




New York (CNN) — As a young doctor with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Philip Landrigan’s job was to chase down epidemics. He’d gone after measles in the Southwest and smallpox in Nigeria.

Then the CDC sent him to Texas for a lead poisoning epidemic.

“I was told to find out what was the cause of the epidemic and to solve it,” Landrigan recalled.

When Landrigan and CDC colleague Dr. Stephen H. Gehlbach arrived in El Paso in 1970, they agreed the prime suspect was a local smelter, which had emitted 1,000 tons of lead into the atmosphere in the previous three years. A smelter extracts metal from its ore through heating and melting.

So the two young doctors got a map, drew three concentric circles centered on the smelter and started taking blood from children in each of the areas. As they suspected, the children closest to the smelter had the highest blood-lead levels; the children farthest away, the lowest.

“There really was a bulls-eye distribution of lead poisoning in El Paso with the epicenter right at the smelter,” Landrigan said.

What they found next contributed to new medical thinking about exposure to toxic chemicals — and helped spur bans on lead-based paint and leaded gasoline.

At the time, poisoning was thought to be all or nothing. If you weren’t showing symptoms like vomiting, muscle weakness or convulsions, you were fine. But Landrigan and the CDC team found that even children in the outer circle of their map were profoundly affected by lead exposure.

“At lower levels of exposures, it still caused loss of intelligence, disruptive behavior, a whole spectrum of damage to the brain and nervous system,” Landrigan said.

This new type of poisoning became known as “subclinical” toxicity because the effects were never severe enough to warrant a trip to the doctor.

Landrigan’s research was published around the same time as studies by Dr. Herbert Needleman, then at Harvard, who was also looking at the effects of lead exposure on IQ in children.

Their research reverberated through the medical establishment and influenced policymakers in the nation’s capital.

In 1973, the Environmental Protection Agency issued new regulations phasing lead out of gasoline. Lead had been used as an additive designed to improve engine performance, and at the time, car emissions produced 200,000 tons of lead a year.

In 1978, the Consumer Product Safety Commission banned lead-based paint.

Since then, the percentage of children aged 1 to 5 with what the CDC considers dangerously high levels of lead in their blood has declined from 77.8 percent to 1.6 percent, according to the most recent figures available.

During his time in El Paso, Landrigan found his calling. He is now director of the Children’s Environmental Health Center at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. He’s also a principal investigator with the National Children’s Study, a 21-year, federal project just getting under way designed to give the most detailed picture to date on how the environment affects health.

When Landrigan flew to El Paso in 1970, 40 milligrams of lead per deciliter of blood was the standard for lead poisoning. Now, the CDC says 10 milligrams of lead per deciliter constitutes lead poisoning and considers no amount of lead completely safe.

Landrigan sees the story of lead as a cautionary tale, and he’s critical of the current federal law governing toxic substances, which does not require testing to show a chemical is safe before it’s put into consumer products.

“We’ve been very careless in simply presuming that chemicals are innocent until proving guilty,” Landrigan said.

“What typically will happen is smart chemists will develop a new product, see that it has useful properties, put it into consumer goods and the chemical then gets disseminated very widely in the marketplace,” He said. “And typically 10 or 15 or 20 years or more later, scientists begin to realize that this chemical is really quite toxic.”

/end of article: reposted from cnn.com

Note: a simple urine test to show the levels of heavy metals, including lead is available.

Filed Under: Lead Poisoning Tagged With: , ,

Shrek Glasses Contain Toxic Cadmium

June 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment




June 4, 2010 McDonalds recalls 12 million Shrek glasses because the paint on them contains poisonous cadmium. DMSA removes cadmium quickly and safely in children and adults.

http://www.webmd.com/parenting/news/20100604/mcdonalds-shrek-glasses-recalled-due-to-cadmium

This news article is reprinted below:

June 4, 2010 — Fast food giant McDonald’s Corp. announced today it is recalling 12 million of its new “Shrek Forever After” glasses because dangerous levels of the metal cadmium have been detected in the decorative paint used for the images.

McDonald’s said it is ordering the voluntary recall in collaboration with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) as a precautionary measure.

The CPSC said consumers should stop using the glasses immediately and said it is illegal to resell or try to resell a product that has been recalled.

“When the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission approached McDonald’s about cadmium in their current movie-themed drinking glasses, the company responded quickly,” McDonald’s spokesman Scott Wolfson says in a news release. “The glasses have far less cadmium than the children’s metal jewelry that [the Consumer Product Safety Commission] has previously recalled.”

The company said the glassware was evaluated by an independent third-party laboratory, accredited by the CPSC, and determined to be in compliance with federal and state requirements at the time of manufacture and distribution.

However, the company said that in light of the CPSC’s “evolving assessment of standards for cadmium” in consumer products, McDonald’s decided “in an abundance of caution” that a voluntary recall was appropriate.

The Shrek Forever After glassware was offered in four glasses at McDonald’s restaurants starting May 21.

The four designs include Puss ‘n’ Boots, Shrek, Princess Fiona, and Donkey.

McDonald’s said people who purchased the glasses should visit its web site at www.mcdonalds.com/glasses starting June 8 for instructions on how to return the glassware and obtain a refund. Customers also may call its toll-free number at 800-244-6227.

The glasses, which sold for about $2 per glass, were manufactured by ARC International of Millville, N.J. McDonald’s says previous McDonald’s glassware was not involved in the recall.

The CPSC said it was “made aware” of issues with the glasses through the office of Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif. She said on her web site that her office had been alerted by an anonymous source and that cadmium “is a toxic substance that is extremely dangerous to the developmental health of children.”

She said children’s health “should not depend on the consciences of anonymous sources” and that “stronger testing standards” are needed for all children’s products before sale.

Speier said she alerted CPSC Chairwoman Inez Tenenbaum last week, who agreed to expedite testing of the glasses.

Filed Under: Other Heavy Metals Tagged With: , , , , ,

Lead Poisoning Kills 160 People

June 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment




Mystery solved. 160 people killed in Nigeria, 111 of them children. Lead, brought into family homes, kills them. DMSA is being used to treat the survivors who have been lead poisoned.

Read full details on CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/06/10/nigeria.poisons/index.html?hpt=T2

This news article is reprinted below:

Yangalama, Northern Nigeria (CNN) — Standing in the graveyard Rabiu Mohammed prays silently in a cemetery that has filled quickly with small tell-tale mounds of earth.

It’s hard to imagine as many freshly dug little graves side by side in a place that’s not a war zone — as there are right now in the Nigerian village of Yangalama.

Rabiu lost two children. At least 68 other boys and girls are buried alongside them, or one-third of the village’s children.

They began dying in January. For months the cause was a mystery, until local authorities, disturbed by the strange manner of the deaths, called in international medical agencies.

By March it was clear the problem was massive and widespread lead poisoning.

“These are months of fear and trepidation for this village,” Rabiu explained.

“You have either lost a child or your brother, or a friend, or someone close to you has lost a child.”

So far the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates 163 people have died of lead poisoning across the region — 111 of them children.

Unwittingly, the villagers brought the lead into their own homes. Searching for gold in nearby mines, they took the metal ore home where it was smashed and processed in the village. The lead and other waste metals are released and discarded.

Unofficial mining is illegal but this region in northern Nigeria is rich in minerals and many people depend on it for their livelihoods.

But it seems this time miners struck a particularly toxic seam of metal ore.

Young children, laying in the dust and sleeping on the bags used to carry the metal ore, are the most susceptible.

The CDC is calling the scale of the problem “unprecedented in the CDC’s work with lead poisoning worldwide.”

Medical authorities have since moved many of the most urgent cases to a nearby hospital, where Medecins Sans Frontieres and the World Health Organization are providing treatment.

More than 50 children are being treated with a medicine that binds itself to lead in the bloodstream so it can be released as urine.

They are expecting 50 more children in the next few weeks.

“[With] some of the initial samples that were taken and sent off for testing in Europe we’re finding some levels over 300, which is just quite shocking for people who would normally treat levels under 10,” explains Dr. Jenny McKinsey, an MSF medical officer.

But mining in the region continues and many people remain in some of the worst affected villages.

The Blacksmith Institute — a global leader in pollution clean-up operations — is trying to remove the highly toxic topsoil in some of the villages. But with the onset of the rainy season it’s a race against time, as the rains make many of the roads impassable and spread the lead throughout the area.

“We are moving quickly to avert a catastrophe as the rainy season approaches,” they warn in a statement.

But at the hospital, the doctors remain cautiously optimistic. “Yes, we’re hoping to stop the acute poisoning,” explained McKinsey.

“As for how low we can get the levels no-one seems to know. We’ve been speaking with specialist toxicologists around the world, getting their opinions and they’re all very interested and waiting to see what will happen.”

But as Rabiu Mohammed closes the wire gate to the graveyard and takes the short walk home — this place is poisoned forever.

Filed Under: Mercury Poisoning Tagged With: , , ,