Lead is a ubiquitous toxic agent that is especially damaging to the young child and the developing fetus. Unlike many environmental health risks, the risks associated with lead are no longer theoretical but have been observed for many years. Indeed, the first regulation of lead in paint was enacted in the 1920s. Currently, because of growing evidence of lead toxicity at lower concentrations, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently lowered its lead-exposure guideline to 10 ug/dl lead in blood from 25 ug/dl. Measuring Lead Exposure in Infants, Children, and Other Sensitive Populations addresses the public health concern about the logistics and feasibility of lead screening in infants and children at such low concentrations. This book will serve as the basis for all U.S. Public Health Service activities and for all state and local programs in monitoring lead.

Every child should have a lead-safe home. That's why HUD is working to create lead-safe affordable housing through outreach and public education, a lead hazard control grant program, worker training, and the enforcement of regulations. This guide is one part of HUD's comprehensive approach to lead safety in the home. If you perform routine maintenance on homes or apartments built before 1978, this guide will help you plan and carry out your work safely. Step-by-step instructions and illustrations explain and show what you need to do to protect yourself and your clients if you are working in older housing that could contain lead paint. This Field Guide is a valuable tool that thousands of workers and contractors across the country are using as part of a national effort to eliminate childhood lead poisoning.

In this incisive examination of lead poisoning during the past half century, Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner focus on one of the most contentious and bitter battles in the history of public health. Lead Wars details how the nature of the epidemic has changed and highlights the dilemmas public health agencies face today in terms of prevention strategies and chronic illness linked to low levels of toxic exposure. The authors use the opinion by Maryland’s Court of Appeals—which considered whether researchers at Johns Hopkins University’s prestigious Kennedy Krieger Institute (KKI) engaged in unethical research on 108 African-American children—as a springboard to ask fundamental questions about the practice and future of public health. Lead Wars chronicles the obstacles faced by public health workers in the conservative, pro-business, anti-regulatory climate that took off in the Reagan years and that stymied efforts to eliminate lead from the environments and the bodies of American children.