To assess the risk of lead poisoning among preschool and school-aged children in Bangladesh, 345 children were screened for blood lead levels (BLLs) from one rural and two urban areas in Bangladesh from September 2007 through January 2008. An urban industrial area at Tongi was identified as a disaster area, where 99% (104/105) of those tested had BLLs >or= 10 microg/dL. Industrial emissions and...

Childhood lead poisoning in the United States remains a persistent, prevalent environmental public health problem, especially for children living in central-city neighborhoods. These neighborhoods typically are racially segregated, are in proximity to current and/or legacy lead emission sources, consist of older housing, and contain disproportionately African American or black children of low-i...

OBJECTIVES To determine the comorbidity of lead poisoning and asthma in urban children, and to examine associated clinical factors. METHODS One-hundred-one patients at an inner-city clinic with blood lead levels (BLLs) of 25 microg/dL or higher (> or =1.2 micromol/L) (BLL25 group) were randomly selected from a tracking lead database and matched on age, sex, and primary language to 101 randoml...

BACKGROUND Children younger than 72 months are most at risk of environmental exposure to lead from ingestion through normal mouthing behavior. Young children are more vulnerable to lead poisoning than adults because lead is absorbed more readily in a child's gastrointestinal tract. Our focus in this study was to determine the extent to which state mandated lead laws have helped decrease the num...

Lead pollution incidents have occurred frequently in mainland China, which has caused many lead poisoning incidents. This paper took a battery recycling factory as the subject, and focused on measuring the blood lead levels of environmental samples and all the children living around the factory, and analyzed the relationship between them. We collected blood samples from the surrounding resident...

We report that the DNA methylation profile of a child's neonatal whole blood can be significantly influenced by his or her mother's neonatal blood lead levels (BLL). We recruited 35 mother-infant pairs in Detroit and measured the whole blood lead (Pb) levels and DNA methylation levels at over 450,000 loci from current blood and neonatal blood from both the mother and the child. We found that mo...

Military personnel often use ammunitions that contain lead. The present study aimed to identify the risks for lead exposure and lead poisoning among workers at indoor firing ranges. A special health examination, including blood lead level (BLL) testing, was performed for all 120 workers at the indoor firing ranges of the Republic of Korea's Air Force, Navy, and Armed Forces Athletic Corps. The ...

Lead is a pervasive environmental contaminant. The adverse health effects of lead exposure in children and adults are well documented, and no safe blood lead threshold in children has been identified. Lead can be ingested from various sources, including lead paint and house dust contaminated by lead paint, as well as soil, drinking water, and food. The concentration of lead, total amount of lea...

OBJECTIVE We derived a clinical decision rule for determining which young children need testing for lead poisoning. We developed an equation that combines lead exposure self-report questions with the child's census-block housing and socioeconomic characteristics, personal demographic characteristics, and Medicaid status. This equation better predicts elevated blood lead level (EBLL) than one us...