The Flint water crisis has left people across the country wondering if lead poisoning is a problem in their community. But it’s very hard to find out how widespread this problem is.
The researchers found no link between lead exposure in childhood and fraud.
AAP Image/Dave Hunt
Lead might not be in paint or gasoline anymore, but since it doesn’t break down in the home or the environment it remains a problem throughout the U.S.
Lead exposure is more common than you think.
CDC/Dawn Arlotta
The University of Michigan-Flint puts experts from academia in the same room as Flint community members, an innovative model for educating the community and forming the public health response.
Flint, Michigan residents couldn’t get answers about their water – so they did their own research.
Laura Nawrocik
A new model of citizen-led science is emerging – as in the case of Flint, Michigan’s poisoned water. Rather than simply supporting scientists, citizens ask their own questions and set the research agenda.
Up until the 1940s, as much as half of U.S. water piping from main lines was made of lead.
Thomashawk/flickr
Chris Sellers, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)
A wake-up call from Flint: the U.S. has made great gains in reducing lead exposure, but the country is still saddled with millions of miles of water-carrying lead pipes.
Pregnant women in three Australian cities are not told that lead exposure during pregnancy is linked to miscarriage and early delivery.
Flickr/Luca Montanari
Parents in three Australian states are being given misleading advice about the dangers of lead to babies and small children – including failing to warn pregnant women about miscarriage risks.
Children living closest to the mines had the lowest literacy and numeracy scores.
Katherine Clark/Flickr
Children in mining and smelting towns who are exposed high levels of lead, arsenic and cadmium are more than twice as likely to have developmental disorders than the national average.
Soil, dust and air-based exposure to lead can interfere with a child’s developing nervous systems and cause behavioural and developmental problems.
Children are particularly susceptible to the toxic effects of lead because their brains and bodies are still developing.
Viacheslav Nikolaenko/Shutterstock
In the shadows of Broken Hill’s rich mining history lies a legacy of contamination and regulatory failure that will likely outlive any benefits locals derive from mining. One in five children aged under…
Lead from Broken Hill leads to pollution abroad.
NSW Records Office
We know elements of the story. It was 1911, as Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen raced to the South Pole. Temperatures were below -50˚C. Scott was British; Amundsen a Norwegian. Sled dogs were dying, and…
Ice cores reveal that Antarctica was polluted long before Scott and Amundsen set foot there.
Andrew Mandemaker/Wikimedia Commons
Lead pollution from Australia reached Antarctica in 1889 – long before the frozen continent’s golden age of exploration – and has remained there ever since, new research shows. In our study, published…
Mount Isa exceeded the national one-hour standard for sulfur dioxide emissions 49 times in 2012.
Zurbagan/Shutterstock
Children in the mining towns of Mount Isa in Queensland and Port Pirie in South Australia are exposed to harmful levels of pollutants that increase their risk of learning and developmental disorders, and…
The South Australian town of Port Pirie – home to a historic smelter – has some of the worst reported toxic air pollution in Australia.
Photo by Imre Hillenbrand www.universalfocus.com.au
Australians living in poorer communities, with lower employment and education levels, as well as communities with a high proportion of Indigenous people, are significantly more likely to be exposed to…
Despite the environment being, according to the Olympic Charter, the “third dimension of Olympism”, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has yet to act on the enormous tonnage of lead shot scattered…
In an analysis of seven sites in NSW, the highest crime rates correlated with the highest levels of lead in the air.
Flickr/Frank de Kleine
It is shocking to discover that more than 3000 children have been lead poisoned in the South Australian town of Port Pirie during the last decade. Whilst Australia continues to be a world leader in lead…