Bruce Lanphear

What we do with lead and most other toxic chemicals, the ones that don't cause cancer, is we assume that there's a safe level or threshold.

until we prove otherwise.

And yet, when you look at the evidence, whether it's about asbestos and mesothelioma, air pollution and cardiovascular mortality, lead in cardiovascular mortality, benzene and leukemia, none of those exhibit a threshold.

In some cases, the risks are steepest proportionately at the lowest measurable levels.

And that really raises some tremendous challenges, right?

Because how are we going to bring air pollution or lead down to zero?

But at the same time, it also provides these tremendous opportunities because we know that they're causing disease.

We know what the sources are.

if we could only bring about the political will to address them, we could prevent a lot of death, disease, and disability.

I mean, about 20% of deaths around the world every year are from air pollution, lead, and other toxic chemicals.

And yet the amount of money we invest in them is just paltry compared to what we invest in other things, which is not to pit one against the other, but it's to say we haven't invested enough in these

And in a way, when we talk about lead playing this tremendous role in the rise and decline of coronary heart disease, we can't entirely separate it out, for example, from air pollution or cigarette smoke, for that matter, nor plastic.

So for example, with air pollution, if we look at air pollution over the past century, up until the 1980s, even into the 90s, it was leaded, right?

So you couldn't separate them.

If you look at cigarette smoke, cigarette tobacco in the 1940s and 50s was grown in fields where they used lead arsenic as an insecticide.

So smokers, even today, have blood levels that are 20% higher than non-smokers.

And people who are not smokers, but exposed to secondhand smoke, have blood lead levels 20% higher than non-smokers who aren't exposed to secondhand smoke.

So in a way, we should try to tease apart these differences, but it's going to be really challenging.

In a way, we could almost think about them as a spectrum of exposures.

Now with plastics...