• Original Articles By Dr. Lavin Featuring Expert Advice & Information about Pediatric Health Issues that you Care the Most About

    An Homage and an Inspiration to Protect our Children

    By Dr. Arthur Lavin

    I was very saddened to read this notice that a great man who has protected so many of our children, Dr. Herbert Needleman, passed away at age 89.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/science/herbert-needleman-dead-lead-poisoning-in-children.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fhealth&action=click&contentCollection=health&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=7&pgtype=sectionfront

    Dr. Needleman’s life and work should serve as an inspiration to everyone.

    His life and work also serve as a warning to us all about how hard it is to protect our children from direct acts of poisoning.

    Dr. Herbert Needleman was a psychiatrist who lived and worked in Pittsburgh, just down the road from us in Cleveland.

    He devoted his life to understanding just what sort of impact on the brain of developing children small exposures to one sort of atom have, the atom of lead.

    I had the tremendous honor of meeting Dr. Needleman when I once served as Director of Community Pediatrics at St. Luke’s Hospital.  In 1992, as part of our Community Pediatrics Forum, Dr. Needleman joined a panel with Dr. Sydney Gellis, the late great head of pediatrics at Tufts University, and Dr. James Besunder, then a leading expert on lead at Case.  The panel was charged with discussing whether exposures to low amounts of lead in childhood had an impact.

    The event contained the great themes of this great man’s life’s work.

    Those themes are:

    1. That there really are substances that poison our children’s brains, causing permanent damage to their ability to think, love, and work.
    2. That there really are very powerful forces devoted to protecting the ability of companies to be allowed to poison at will.

    The Impact of Lead on the Brain of a Young Child

    Everyone knows, and has known for a very, very long time, that high doses of lead poison the brain.

    What does that mean, and why use such a loaded word as poison?

    What it means is that this substance lead, if absorbed into a young person’s body, takes an action that dramatically harms the person.  That action is to damage the ability of the person’s brain to work, to function, to develop.  This leaves the person unable to work or love normally.  Such an impact is a catastrophe.

    I use the word poison for substances whose impact on our bodies or brains is truly catastrophic, causing permanent disabling damage.

    I prefer the word poison because it is accurate and direct.  It describes the impact of a dangerous chemical very well.

    By anyone’s definition, lead is a poison.

    Now, Dr. Needleman’s work established something no one knew before- that lead is a poison at very low levels of exposure.

    Most of the history of lead poisoning was made by the dramatic harm done by exposure to large amounts of lead.  When lead was in our paint and car’s gasoline (it is still in airplane and farm equipment gasoline today!), children would often appear in the hospital with lead levels 8 times or more the current threshold of safe.  This would cause seizures and coma.  It didn’t take much to notice this metal was poisonous.

    Even with such flagrant evidence of it being a grave poison, it took our nation about 50 years to do anything about it.   We knew in the 1920’s that lead was deadly, but it was not until the 1970’s that it was removed from paint and car gasoline.  The main reason children kept being plunged into coma and suffering grievous damage to their brains for those 50 years was found right here in Cleveland- the paint companies.   Like tobacco, industries that produce poisons don’t like being told to stop doing so.

    The Impact of Removing Lead from the Environment

    But those lobbying efforts finally failed, and lead was eventually removed from paint and car gasoline.  The results were crazy dramatic.  Lead levels as measured in the blood of children plummeted.   The normal level in the blood, set by professional health agencies once was 25, now it is 5 and dropping.

    Perhaps the very most dramatic change had to do with something Dr. Needleman prepared us to know- crime.

    We all know that the level of violent crime in America has dropped to historic lows over the last 40-50 years.   But did you know that leading experts in the field of lead have established that at least 60% of the drop in crime in the US since 1970 is because we dropped lead levels?

    That’s right, lead is such a powerful poison to the brain, that it can alter how we behave.  Lead is clearly related to changes in the brain that lead to more violent and anti-social behavior.

    Lead is not the only cause of crime, but it turns out to be a big cause.

    Dr. Needleman’s Insight

    Dr. Needleman’s biggest insight came from studying the level of lead directly in our bones.

    Up until this work, the main way to measure the amount of lead in your body was to take some blood and measure its level in your blood.  The problem is that if yo eat a bite of lead, the lead atoms course through your bloodstream for a bit, but end up deposited, permanently, in your bones.   So, you might have eaten a bunch f lead a year ago, and most of it may remain in your bones, but your blood test will say not much is present.

    To get around that clinicians would sometimes turn to checking the amount of lead in other parts of the body readily tested, for example, hair.

    Dr. Needleman thought, what do kids, the main group we want to know about with lead, do that opens doors to knowing the actual level of lead in their bones, the spot where lead settles after exposure?  His answer was:  teeth.

    Think about it, all children lose all 20 of their teeth, everyone.  And most of those teeth are thrown away, with all due respect to our friend the Tooth Fairy.

    Dr. Needleman said, don’t throw away your teeth, donate them to me and my lab.

    Lots of people did just that, and so Dr. Needleman was able to measure the actual level of lead in a child’s bones at the time they lost that tooth, and then looked to see if those levels correlated with any problems.

    The answer was loud and clear.

    As lead levels in children’s teeth went up troubles got worse, including failing to learn in school, dropout rates,rates of criminal behavior.

    and

    This trend began at any lead level over 0.00.   Even tiny elevations, tiny exposures, poisoned the child’s brain.

    The Response to Dr. Needleman’s Work

    You would think the work of Dr. Needleman would lead to a public surge of gratitude.  This man opened the door to protecting our children from a lifetime of disability and/or crime.

    That’s the sort of help that goes beyond some of our greatest hero’s contributions.  The polio vaccine saved thousands of children from neurologic disability, and rightly is seen as a heroic triumph.  But the work of Dr. Needleman offered literally millions of children a lifetime of relief from neurologic disabilities.   You would think his work was celebrated.

    But it was not to be.  Instead of celebration, he was attacked.  The attacks came from the paint and the lead industries.  It was bad enough they lost some major battles in the 1970’s culminating in the removal of lead from paint and car gasoline.  Now comes Dr. Needleman claiming that even small amounts of lead can cause harm to the brain.

    The industries employed the poisoner’s favorite approach to weakening the impact of news exposing their product as a poison:  rumor.

    The rumor they launched was that Dr. Needleman must have falsified his data, after all, it could not have been correct.

    The industries funded one lawsuit after another against this one man, claiming he made up his findings.  The suits dragged on for years, and even led to formal investigation of the professor at his college in Pittsburgh.   He was fully exonerated, but only after years of suffering his name being sullied and his family beset by legal attacks.

    It was during this time that he came to St. Luke’s to participate in our conference, where the celebrated dean of American pediatrics, Dr. Syndney Gellis, presided over the presentation of Dr. Needleman’s life work to this Cleveland audience.   One curious member of the audience was a psychologist, who tried to discredit the work presented.  It turned out this psychologist received payments from a local paint company and was suspected of asking her questions as part of the campaign to attack Dr. Needleman.

    But Dr. Needleman weathered the storm and his results stand.  Further studies have confirmed his initial findings, and we now know for  sure that even a tiny exposure to lead can hurt your mind.

    The Legacy of Dr. Needleman’s Work

    There is no doubt that Dr. Needleman’s work has an impact on all our lives today.

    His work makes it as clear as possible that allowing any lead into our child’s body, causes some level of harm.  The more the worse.  But even a little bit is poisonous, it causes harm.

    His work also helped establish the very notion that there are poisons in our air and water that do change the lives of our children, forever.

    And so the legacy of Dr. Needleman’s work includes these 4 important effects:

    1. Lead is established as a poison for our children’s minds at any level over 0.
    2. There are substances, chemicals, compounds, in our air and water that change the lives of our children forever, in short, there are poisons.
    3. Industries that make such poisons work vociferously to deny that the chemicals they make are poisons.
    4. If any parent or doctors, anyone, wants to protect our children from poison to their minds, it will take much work to see the exposure actually decrease.  In the case of lead in paint and car gasoline, that took 50 years of hard work.

    The Challenge of Dr. Needleman’s Work to Us Today

    The real challenge of Dr. Needleman’s work, a challenge I first experienced in the 1990’s when I listened to him present at St. Luke’s is very simple to state, but so hard to respond to:

    The known poisons that permanently damage our children’s minds will continue do so until enough people stop it from happening.

    Lead caused coma and rises in crime, until 50 years of hard work culminated in actions that reduced the exposures to lead.

    It took years of hard work, but the results were extraordinary- an end to lead induced seizures and coma in children, and a majority role in reducing the American crime epidemic.

    That’s the nature of work against poison, we see it in our lives today.  Check out www.projecttendr.com.  This is a consortium of 50 and more of today’s Dr. Needlemans.  These are the nation’s top experts on just what chemicals in our air and water, today, cause brain damage to developing minds.

    That is, these are the scientists who have devoted their lives to finding which poisons still are being produced and impacting our children’s minds.

    What impacts are they seeing?

    Autism

    ADHD

    Learning disorders.

    Project TENDR has published its first paper, identifying 5 poisons that play a role in the chance our children will have autism, ADHD, or learning disorders.

    TENDR has presented its findings to the Surgeon General, to members of Congress, and in various publications.

    TENDR is developing policies that would drop the chance our child would ever have each of the identified poisons enter their brain to cause damage.

    Just as in Dr. Needleman’s day, we are already seeing attempts by those who manufacture these poisons to discredit those whose scientific work over a lifetime establish the chemical in question as poisonous to the developing mind.

    Let us hope that just as in Dr. Needleman’s day that those who want their children protected prevail.

    BOTTOM LINES

    1. The nation lost a great hero when Dr. Herbert Needleman passed this year.
    2. What made him great was his idea of measuring lead level in baby teeth and then seeing how those levels correlated with severe problems.
    3. His work established that lead at any level harms the human mind.
    4. His work also established that in stark contrast to finding germs that hurt us, when a chemical is found to be poisonous, there is usually an industry willing to fight for decades to continue making it.   No company has ever spent its resources pushing for the public to accept a dangerous germ, imagine a polio lobby trying to talk us into ignoring polio.
    5.   This issue is front and center today.  Project TENDR has published its findings that chemicals such as mercury, flame retardants, key air pollution elements, key insecticides, as well as lead, poison developing minds helping cause ADHD, autism, and learning disorders.
    6. As in the day of Dr. Needleman, we each face a choice, will we respond to learning that this or that chemical can damage developing minds, or allow current manufacture and ongoing poisoning to continue?

    So here is the memory of Dr. Herbert Needleman.

    May we always honor his memory by ignoring the controversies that hover about words like regulation, and keep our minds sharp in defending our children from needless and quite disabling poisons.

    To your health,
    Dr. Arthur Lavin

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