LANv16n3
Editorial
The good news is
that Volcano Art Prize is open to entries for another 12 weeks, until 25th
July 2016. Please help make this our biggest competition ever! Your donations
can bump up the cash prizes too, but Pictureproducts
has kindly donated 30 mugs (printed) again so there are 32 prizes up for grabs.
The best news I’ve
heard in a long time is that three of the final 6 leaded petrol countries have
apparently gone unleaded as at the end of January 2016. That means, leaded gasoline is still sold in Algeria, Iraq and
Yemen because a US company needs the profits! We’ve put together a list of some
of the top shareholders of Innospec Inc (who make the lead additive for petrol), so that you
know which funds and investors to avoid because they hold shares in a company
that makes a profit out of a product that keeps 100 million people still
exposed (totally preventably) to lead from motor
vehicle emissions.
More good news: the world’s second largest paint company
agreed to phase out lead from all paints by 2020. The media release comes from
a hero of The LEAD Group’s Technical Advisory Board, Perry Gottesfeld
who played a vital role in the decision. And thanks to Linda Parker and Susan
Smith from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for their kind permission to reprint the
Post-Gazette’s article about the company, PPG.
In the article What does WHO and ANZFS say
about lead in food? I trust the reader will
see that while the World Health Organisation has said six years ago (in 2010)
that there is no level of lead in food that can be regarded as health
protective, Australian and New Zealand Food Standards has recently (March 2016)
published “revised” metal residue limits for foods - but the maximum amounts
for lead in food are unchanged, (except that there is a new limit of 2
milligrams per kilogram (mg/kg) for lead in salt).
Shouldn’t the maximum
residue limits for lead (and other metals) in Australian foods be revised
downwards now that WHO and Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council
(NHMRC) have recognised that blood lead levels should be reduced to as low as
reasonably achievable, and certainly below the new (NHMRC, May 2015) reference
blood lead level of 5 micrograms per decilitre (µg/dL)?
LEAD Action News readers will be delighted to
hear that the NHMRC has finally published the long-awaited Managing Individual Exposure to Lead in Australia - A Guide for Health
Practitioners. From memory, there’s been talk of publishing this Lead Guide
for doctors, etc since 2012! I haven’t even had a
chance to glance at it yet so I’d be very interested in reader-feedback (letters
to the editor) on the NHMRC Lead Guide for case managers, for publication in
the next issue of LEAD Action News.
President
of The LEAD Group, Professor Mark Taylor has
co-authored some new publications too, but again I haven’t had time to read
them so let me know what you think:
Tracing changes in
atmospheric sources of lead contamination using lead isotopic compositions in
Australian red wine, at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0045653516303319 and
Unravelling a ‘miner’s myth’ that environmental
contamination in mining towns is naturally occurring, at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26919836
Michael
Galvin from Tasmania has sent in Part 2 of his article of which Part 1 was
published in LEAD Action News vol 16 no 2. Other heavy metal contamination news from
Tasmania has been reprinted here from the Tasmanian
Times in full with the comments – with acknowledgement of Lindsay Tuffin, Editor.
Thanks
kindly to Heath Harrison, Editor, Newcastle Herald, for permission to reprint
the Paul Maguire article Chickens lickin’ lead poisoning and Peter Lewis’ Lead Battery Hens (hilarious and
seriously good) cartoon. I’ve requested a copy of the Boolaroo Egg Lead study
mentioned in The Herald (1994) article from Dr Craig Dalton, Director,
Population Health, Hunter New England Local Health District, so hopefully we’ll
be able to publish the link to it or the full study in the next issue of
LEAD Action News.
Thanks to our
wonderful volunteer translator Orlando Aguirre-Lopez, we have the Spanish
version of the Tom Neltner article published in the
last issue of LEAD Action News: Household
Action Level for Lead in Drinking Water.
There’s an occupational health submission by Andrew Hobday which is old but we’re web-publishing it as it’s
been taken down from the federal government website; and there’s a 2016
occupational lead exposure submission from The LEAD Group to finish.
Finally, I’d like to congratulate our volunteer Data-Analyst
Namita Patnaik, on the recent birth of her daughter,
and to ask all our readers if they can put their hand up to do the important
work that Namita was doing – collating comments I’ve
written about lab lead test results obtained through LEAD Group Kits, as well
as to ask if anyone could volunteer their talents at database and website design
and building, so we can get the Lead Test Kit Results website up and running –
fully automated and with a much quicker turnaround on results and reports –
ASAP!