“From personal tragedy to public health crisis” of the book “Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America's Children” by Markowitz and Rosner, the lead poisoning and the actions taken is discussed. In the early 1900’s, health departments throughout the U.S. were not communicating and helping each other to fight the public threat of lead. Therefore it was easy for the Lead Industries Association (LIA) to downplay the impact of lead and for manufactures to avoid regulation. Paint was…
The use of lead has been gradually phased out progressively over the years, but one must never forget why that is. Tetraethyl lead was introduced as an alternative to ethanol by two scientists, Thomas Midgley and Charles Kettering. Even though the corroboration indicates various culprits. It is apparent that the blame cannot lie on health organizations or the government, but solely on the scientists producing the deadly chemical. Tetraethyl lead was an issue that was put to rest 17 years ago,…
considerable amount of lead. A class action lawsuit brought by multiple residents against the Governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, the State of Michigan, the City of Flint, and many others, showed that the state Department of Environmental Quality violated the federal law when they failed to treat the water from the Flint River with an anti-corrosive agent. Treating water that flows through Flint’s water pipes is crucial due to the fact that, as stated earlier, many of the pipes contained lead.…
As the health and safety manager, I’ve identified that workers were exposed to cadmium and lead. Cadmium is a soft malleable transition metal. It is silvery bluish-white in color. Although toxic by nature, this chemical element is commonly used to create dry cell batteries. Like mercury, cadmium has the lowest melting point of groups three through eleven transition metals. Lead is a malleable soft heavy metal that is denser than most common materials. It bluish-white in color when freshly cut,…
4. Metal poisoning came to the foreground of the American consciousness when a spotlight was shown on the high lead levels in Flint’s water system in Michigan. Although many steps have been performed to reduce lead poisoning, namely in children, such as removing lead paint from homes in 1978, removing lead from gasoline, and proposing stricter laws on imported toys containing lead, heavy metal poisoning still exists. Chelation therapy is still the preferred medical treatment for such heavy metal…
Lead has been around for thousands of years, used with various products, and is a deadly element. Lead is found in all parts of Earth’s crust and has been used in products of various items in our homes, such as paint, pipes, batteries and even cosmetics (“Lead poisoning….” 2017). Humans have learned that lead is highly dangerous once inside our bodies, shutting down organs and beginning a wide collection of symptoms from lead poisoning. It is released into the environment through industrial…
Common Loons to lead poisoning. Knowing the deaths would be detrimental to a severely threatened population, an investigation of dead loons, collected from 1989 to 2010, was carried out by the Loon Preservation Committee, Dr. Mark Pokras of Tufts University, and Tiffany Grade, a graduate student from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Necropsies and tissue samples showed lead poisoning was responsible for nearly half of all the dead birds examined. Despite legislation in place to ban lead…
Advancement in Radiation Protection: Non-Lead Apron People are exposed to radiation every day just by being alive on this earth. One receives approximately 3,000 µSv of ubiquitous background radiation a year, which means approximately 8.2 µSv per day (Howerton, Iannucci, 2012). This is known as background radiation and is caused by terrestrial, cosmic, and naturally occurring radon. On the other hand, during radiographic examination some degree of biological damage does occur during exposure,…
FOR more than two decades Wittenoom in WA’s Pilbara region was a mining stronghold. The small country town which lies around 1400kms northeast of Perth was also, at one stage, the only place in Australia that produced blue asbestos. But when demand for the deadly mineral began to wane and fears of serious health concerns began to emerge, the operation was shut down in 1966. However it was another decade before authorities realised the blue dust that swept throughout the town was extremely…
Which 1980s New Romantic pop group released a song entitled, "Fade to Grey"? Having started out hosting club nights at Billy's nightclub in Soho, founding members Steve Strange and Rusty Egan wanted to tap into the growing New Wave culture of syntho-pop, forming Visage in the late 1970s. Recruiting amongst others, Midge Ure and Billy Curry - whom also performed with Ultravox - the band's first single was a cover of Zager and Evans "In the Year 2525". This record though proved to be a…