We Ignore Lead in the Atmosphere at Our Own Peril

    You look up at the skies and you won't see it, just like you don't see so many of the pollutants, but there is one up there -- and it is one that gets little, if any, attention -- that could be killing you.

   Lead. Yes, little particals of lead -- the dust of death.

   Years and decades after the death of lead gasoline, it's still up there. Some of it, anyway. Oh, it is much less. If there were 500 to 600 nanograms per cubic feet of airborne lead in the 1980s in some parts of the world, those levels were all the way down to 20 nanograms per cubic feet by 2000.

  Maybe that's why the world has quit worrying. Here's the trick, though: There is no safe level of lead. A little is a lot. Some is too much. A drip is a drillion. Studies show even small concentrations are damaging.

  Some aviation fuels, waste incineration, and metal processing -- among other things -- are still spewing the dust of death. And, when the particles settle to the ground, they often are stirred up again when the soil is disturbed, causing the dust of death to reenter the atmosphere. 

  Perhaps you don't know how damaging lead can be. Way back at the onset of lead gasoline being used in automobiles, five refinery workers died from lead poisoning. Others were hallucinating. Others going crazy. So, most states banned lead gasoline. But U.S. government regulators -- who should have been on the side of the public and protecting the public  -- overruled the states and returned lead gasoline to the marketplace.

  The point is it was killing people then, and if there is no safe threshold, it is likely killing us now. And, the harm is not in death, alone. It attacks the brain and nervous system, the reproductive organs, the kidneys, and the immune system. If affects the cardiovascular system and the flow of oxygen in the blood.

  The dust of death doesn't have to kill to leave the body destroyed.

   The world is running scared of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. In the Paris Agreement and subsequent efforts, we have come up with standards and deadlines for those gases. 

   Now, what of lead? Should we not also have a plan for it? If we ignore it, we do so at our own peril.