Nirad Mudur & Jaunet Gurudas / NewIndpress
Bangalore, Sep 15: Lead poisoning may be silently corroding India's vast human resource pool. But health officials remain in the dark about the threat, not to mention on how to tackle the silent "terror" that shows no symptoms.
This is why: Official apathy due to ignorance, uninformed public and high lead content in various products in the absence of a regulatory and inspection mechanism continue to affect people's health.
This continues a decade after one of the world's largest ever sample survey by the National Referral Centre for Lead Poisoning in India (NRCLPI) involving nearly 30,000 people in India revealed shocking details about high levels of lead in children's and pregnant women's blood.
Samples of Ganesha idols collected by this website's newspaper have proved to have high lead content on being tested at the Central Environmental Laboratory of the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB).
The oil-painted idols contained 8.44 milligrams (mg) per kilogram weight, while the water-painted smaller idols contained 5.78 mg/kg.
The Indian Standards Organisation has set safe limits of 0.1 mg/litre of lead in inland surface waters and 1 mg/litre of lead in water in public sewers. For drinking water it is 0.50 mg/litre.
Interestingly, there is no global consensus over a human safety limit for exposure to lead.
According to Prof Anita Bijoor of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, St John's National Academy of Health Sciences, and attached to the National Referral Centre for Lead Poisoning in India (NRCLPI), the CEL figures if correlated on a larger scale when thousands of idols are immersed in limited number of water bodies, the threat of exposure to lead poisoning would be high.
A research in New England Journal of Medicine in April 2003 warns that children can lose IQ points even at levels of lead below the 10 micro-grams/decilitre of blood set by the US Centre for Disease Prevention.
The American National Academy of Sciences points to growing evidence that exposure even to very small levels of lead can produce subtle effects in humans and that future safe limits may be further dropped as the mechanism of lead toxicity becomes better understood.
According to NRCLPI experts, even low levels of exposure to lead can result in IQ deficits. It can significantly increase disabilities, stunted growth, impaired hearing, high-school dropout rate, juvenile delinquency and criminal behaviour.
At increasingly high levels of exposure, a child may suffer kidney damage, become mentally retarded, fall into a coma, and even die from lead poisoning.
Shockingly, while children are dropping out of school, juvenile delinquency and criminal behaviour among children are increasingly being reported in India, none suspects it could be because of probable increase in lead levels in the blood of Indian children.
Instead, there is indifference. When millions of toys from USA and UK were returned by families there due to high lead content, only a few hundreds were sent back by Indian families in New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata.
And here is a sample of the official ignorance: when asked about preventive measures the Karnataka Department of Health and Family Welfare Services was taking over lead exposure, its director Dr M B Rudrappa retorted "Lead? X-rays should be able to show."