Lead poisoning is now getting more attention — and funds to fight it. Above: At a U.N. conference in Kenya, a booth offers information about testing and treatment.Lead poisoning is now getting more attention — and funds to fight it. Above: At a U.N. conference in Kenya, a booth offers information about testing and treatment.In a world full of threats to children — from war to disease to starvation — there's a neglected crisis that's just now getting a jolt of attention.
I really think it's because of Flint, Michigan . That brought home how significant the harms could be to children's brains and their development and educational attainment and in the long run cause high rates of cardiovascular disease. President Biden made the issue of lead poisoning in Flint and the rest of the U.S. a major focus, and we also saw that there were goods coming into the United States that had high levels of lead.
No. 2, it's tractable. There are relatively low-cost things that can be done in a resource-constraint environment that mostly have to do with eliminating the use of lead in consumer goods, where it's totally unnecessary, and addressing and enforcing laws and regulations in countries around the world that can keep it out
Third will be straightforward actions to address the issue. I was recently at a meeting with a team from Indonesia and could show them evidence of how nearly all of the paint in their country that's been tested turns out to have very high lead levels and that there's an opportunity to join, a voluntary partnership formed by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Health Organization to prevent exposure to lead by promoting the phaseout of paints containing lead.
What skills do you bring from your professional experience that are helping you work to resolve this issue?