Role of the lead industry in a public health tragedy

By the mid-1920s, there was strong and ample evidence of the toxicity of lead paint to children, to painters, and to others who worked with lead as studies detailed the harm caused by lead dust, the dangers of cumulative doses of lead, the special vulnerability of children, and the harm lead caused to the nervous system in particular. Despite the accumulating evidence that the industry was gathering about lead paint's dangers to young children, it did nothing either to discourage the use of leaded paint on walls and woodwork or to warn the general public or public health authorities of the dangers inherent in its product. In fact, throughout the 20th century, it engaged in a campaign designed to assure the public that its product was safe. In the end, the continuing crisis we have today with the lead poisoning of children cannot be understood without an appreciation of the enormous resources the lead industry devoted to allaying public health concerns from the 1920s through the early 1950s. The Lead Industries Association adopted a three pronged approach in dealing with the public health concerns about lead paint on interior surfaces: 1. The lead industry claimed that the problems associated with lead paint and children just involved toys and cribs and that by 1930 this was no longer a problem because toy manufacturers no longer used lead paint on these products. 2. The lead industry saw this not as a public health problem but instead as a public relations problem -- that the public health professionals and consumers had to be reassured that it was safe to use lead based paints. Often employing the image of children themselves, they engaged in aggressive marketing and advertising campaigns to signal their product's appropriateness for indoor use at a time when the medical evidence was accumulating that showed that kids were being poisoned. 3. They engaged in an effort to blame the victims of lead poisoning, by first identifying those suffering from the disease as suffering from morbid appetites, or pica, and second by blaming what they called “ineducable parents” for children continuing to come down with lead poisoning in the 1950s.