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Experimenting on Children: Despite the lessons from experience with lead in gasoline, Canadian regulators are only slowly adopting more precautionary approaches to environmental health threats involving children. (Children & Health).

Article Excerpt
LAST WINTER at an Ardene store, I paid ten dollars to buy five necklaces, all of them containing exceptionally dangerous levels of lead. Ardene is a chain of stores found across the country offering a wide assortment of inexpensive kitsch, hair care products and jewelry. Children love to shop at these stores; most prices are well within their reach.

Ardene stores are not unique in selling products containing lead. They are examples, among many. When I asked the salesclerk if she knew the necklaces were made of lead, she had several reactions: First, a worldly wise, "Oh, I wouldn't be surprised," then a more thoughtful, "Lead is bad, right?" followed by "Then, why are you buying them?"

To confirm for myself how easy it is, I said.

This exchange happened several months after Health Canada's Product Safety Bureau had sent a second round of letters to jewelry importers, distributors and retailers -- nearly 8000 letters in all -- asking them to please not sell these products. The salesclerk had never heard of any such letters.

Tests by Health Canada, confirmed by independent testing done for CBC's Marketplace and the Hamilton Spectator, revealed lead levels of 7 to 13 percent in this jewelry. These percentages translate into 70,000 to 130,000 parts per million. In environmental health parlance, whether we are talking lead or mercury or pesticides, measurements of a few parts per million or parts per billion are the norm.

Over an exposure period of two weeks, the amount of lead circulating in a child's bloodstream that can interfere, probably permanently, with normal development and functioning of the brain and nervous system could fit on the head of a pin. (1) Health Canada advises -- with no regulatory backing, no powers of product recall and no federal priority being placed on establishing such rules -- that jewelry should not have a lead content of more than 65 parts per million.

These necklaces are a serious health hazard for children. So are the candles recently discovered to have lead wicks, and so were the plastic mini-blinds from Mexico and Asia in 1996 and the crayons from China in 1994 and on down a long list of imported consumer products discovered during the 199 Os and up to the present.

In most cases, the lead content of these products was discovered by accident during mandatory childhood blood-lead screening programs. (2) Mandatory that is, in the US, where tests were established in the late 1980s and early 1990s in response to evidence of lead poisoning in literally millions of children exposed to lead historically used in paint and gasoline. All of these unexpected and dangerous sources of lead in consumer products have appeared since 1990; that is, after the US and Canada regulated lead out of gasoline.

Health Canada began work on its regulatory response (3) to these hazardous products in 1997 and might be finished in 2002. The process is so slow it might as well be moving backwards. Or perhaps it is simply frozen by the regulatory chill created by the deregulation agenda flowing from international trade agreements. (4)

The regulatory initiative to ban leaded gasoline was taken on the basis of definitive proof of harm to children exposed to low levels of lead. Such proof is very rare in environmental policy debates. In the case of lead, we got definitive proof by conducting what amounted to an enormous, uncontrolled "experiment" on our children. Behind the now well-known fact that lead is bad for children is a mountain of complex scientific inquiry stretching back more than 30 years. Documentation exists in painstaking detail about the multiple sources, exposure pathways and subtle but profound and often permanent effects of tiny amounts of lead on a child's brain and behaviour. (5)

At every step along that path towards scientific certainty, the commercial importance of lead in gasoline motivated and funded the "other side" of the debate, often to counter the findings of more independent science. In the face of that debate, regulatory agencies, particularly in Canada, took a wait-and-see...