外刊阅读20250112｜这种油中的剧毒物质，给美国带来了1.51亿个心理障碍的孩子

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Lead is toxic to every system in the human body. This week marks 60 years since a crucial study by Mitsunobu Tatsumoto and Clair Patterson in Nature found that the world’s oceans were awash with lead (M. Tatsumoto and C. Patterson Nature 199, 350–352; 1963). Contamination from petrol, paint and industrial sources had leaked planet-wide — it was a public-health crisis. Since then, the fight against lead poisoning has seen great success: in 2021, leaded fuels were completely phased out. Yet much remains to be done.

Around the world, 815 million children — 1 in 3 — have dangerous levels of lead in their bloodstream , enough to cause irreversible brain damage, intellectual disability, lower educational attainment, behavioural disorders, reduced lifetime earnings, anaemia , kidney disease and cardiovascular disease. The health effects in children and adults lead to nearly one million deaths annually and widespread disability. Lead’s impacts on cognitive development are estimated to cause nearly US$1 trillion of income loss in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) each year.

The shocking lack of attention to such an enormous and solvable problem is probably because 94% of the disease burden from lead exposure happens in LMICs. Each year, only about $10 million of international funding is spent on addressing global lead poisoning. This is orders of magnitude less than the $8.2 billion that governments donated last year for HIV/AIDS, which similarly kills nearly one million people a year.

Laws banning lead paint are highly effective at preventing lead exposure— but there are more than 70 countries without lead-paint laws, and others where such laws are not well enforced. Strong laws and enforcement are the main things we call for at the Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP), at which I am a programme manager and team leader.

LEEP supports governments to ban the manufacture and sale of lead paints, working collaboratively with industry and non-governmental organizations. Over the past three years, 6 of our 12 governmental partners — Malawi, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Pakistan and Ghana — have committed to regulating lead paint, and industries in four of these countries are already switching to non-lead paint.