When Dr. Philip Landrigan was a young pediatric resident at Boston Children’s Hospital in the late 1960s, he started encountering children who had swallowed chips of lead paint. Tragically, many of them died. “A paint chip half the size of your smallest fingernail could kill a child five times over,” he says. 

Those who survived were transformed. 

“They lost cognitive function,” Landrigan says. In many cases, their behavior changed. “I remember one mom telling me her son had been a sweet boy before he ingested lead and now would fly into a rage and hit other kids.” 

Those experiences stayed with him. As he continued to practice medicine, Landrigan also began researching the health impacts of lead, which, in those days, could be found not just in paint but also in gasoline, pipes and consumer products like hair dyes, food cans and toys. 

One of his earliest studies, published in 1970, established that airborne lead particles, like those found at the time in automobile exhaust, could negatively impact children’s health. Until then, doctors believed there was no risk. 

Fifty years ago last week, the efforts of researchers and advocates working to remove lead bore its first fruit when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued the rule that began phasing lead out of gasoline. 

Since then, doctors and researchers have detailed lead’s many harms on kids. Not only does lead exposure decrease IQ and impulse control, it increases the prevalence of ADHD and behavioral problems. Some researchers have even correlated childhood lead exposure with increases in crime rates about 20 years later. 

And children aren’t the only ones hurt by lead. In adults, the toxic metal causes kidney problems, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and osteoporosis. In fact, in the U.S. each year, more than 400,000 people die prematurely from heart disease attributed to lead exposure.

Landrigan, who now leads the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good at Boston College, compares the public health benefits of getting airborne lead out of automobile exhaust to the polio vaccine and the eradication of smallpox. “They’re all macro, global-scale triumphs that have saved millions upon millions of lives,” he says.

Plus, there have been economic benefits in the form of decreased healthcare costs, reduced need for special education and increases in IQ and resulting earnings. In the U.S., the economic benefits of the removal of lead from paint alone have been estimated at more than $8 trillion over the course of the last 40 years.

But while the U.S. has made considerable progress protecting the public from lead, there’s still more to do. 

• Where to look for lead in your home

An estimated 35 million American homes built before 1978 contain lead-based paint, and there are 9.2 million lead service pipes still carrying water to homes, schools and businesses.

And while children’s blood lead levels have fallen dramatically since the 1970s, half of American children under the age of 6 who were tested between 2018 and 2020 had detectable levels of lead in their blood — with lead contamination being more common in low-income communities and communities of color. This is due to many factors, including discriminatory practices in housing that have left communities of color with greater poverty and substandard housing.

Work to remove lead continues. Last week, the EPA proposed a rule that would require utilities to replace 10% of their lead pipes every year for the next 10 years to reduce lead in drinking water. 

“The socioeconomic benefits from the rule vastly outweigh the cost by $17.3 to $34.8 billion per year,” says Tom Neltner, EDF’s senior director for safer chemicals. “That’s a whopping 8 to 12 times the annual cost of replacement.”