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Thomas v. Mallett7/15/2005
By the 1930s, Kehoe agreed with the broader medical community that toys, cribs, furniture, as well as woodwork and any other painted surfaces in children's reach were possible sources of child lead poisoning. In 1933, Kehoe highlighted the disparate impact lead poisoning had on children and adults and stressed that "strenuous efforts must be devoted to eliminating lead from [children's] environment." In 1935, he again expressed his belief that " he occurrence of lead-containing commodities and the use of lead paints on furniture, toys, and other objects, within the reach of small children is much too common to ignore."
In 1944, after Byers and Lord's publication on the effects of lead on long-term intellectual development, the LIA wrote to Kehoe, acknowledging that if their conclusions were correct, "we have indeed a most serious public health hazard." Kehoe responded, writing:
I fear that you will be disappointed by my answer, for I am disposed to agree with the conclusions arrived at by the authors, and to believe that their evidence, if not entirely adequate, is worthy of very serious consideration. Perhaps my own experience prejudices me in favor of the acceptance of their findings, for I have seen cases of serious mental retardation in children that have recovered from lead poisoning of the encephalopathic type, and among my records is one case of permanent feeble mindedness which I attribute to a well defined episode of lead encephalopathy in an infant.
You quarrel with the statement about chewing paint and say that the manufacturers don't use it on cribs and toys. That may well be true. My experience leads me to accept it as such. However, the householder repaints these articles, and often with lead-containing paints. Please note that the article makes point of the fact that the children chewed paint "off cribs, window sills or furniture," and also refers to the statement of parents that they had repainted cribs. I'm afraid it will do you no good to try to combat the significance of the history of chewing articles in relation to the problem of lead poisoning in children. The most significant feature of the history of exposure in an overwhelming proportion of the cases of lead poisoning in children is just that fact. "Pica" is at the bottom of most of these cases, and unfortunately the environment of small children is not sufficiently free of lead for their safety. Have you seen the data on lead poisoning in children in Queensland[, Australia]? These cases were largely due to chewing the paint off the railings of the porches on which the children played.
With reassurances from Aub, the LIA disagreed with Kehoe's assessment, stating:
t has not been conclusively proven and, the case made out by Drs. Byers and Lord that there is a connection between retarded mental development in later years and lead poisoning itself, is far from proven. As Dr. Aub told me, he felt that children who have . . . the disease known as "pica" which caused them to chew on inedible articles, were subnormal to start with!
Despite assurances from the LIA that children's toys no longer contained lead paint, the U.S. Children's Bureau warned in December 1945 that " t is not safe to take the word of the salesman as to whether [a paint] is harmless or not because he may not know." According to Markowitz and Rosner, "The LIA did not advocate the use of warning labels, nor did it encourage the elimination of interior use of white lead. Only these measures could have served to diminish or eliminate the problem. To the contrary, . . . the LIA and its members continued to promote lead paint for interior use." Sherwin-Williams and Glidden actually still prom
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