Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in early childhood

Michael J. McFarland, Matt E. Hauer and Aaron Reuben
Additional contact information
Michael J. McFarland: a Department of Sociology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306;; b Center for Demography and Population Health, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306;
Matt E. Hauer: a Department of Sociology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306;; b Center for Demography and Population Health, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306;
Aaron Reuben: c Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022, vol. 119, issue 11, e2118631119

Abstract: Considerable effort is expended to protect today’s children from lead exposure, but there is little evidence on the harms past lead exposures continue to hold for yesterday’s children, who are victims of what we term legacy lead exposures. We estimate that over 170 million Americans alive today were exposed to high-lead levels in early childhood, several million of whom were exposed to five-plus times the current reference level. Our estimates allow future work to plan for the health needs of these Americans and to inform estimation of the true contributions of lead exposure to population health. We estimate population-level effects on IQ loss and find that lead is responsible for the loss of 824,097,690 IQ points as of 2015.

Keywords: population; lead; cognitive (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.pnas.org/content/119/11/e2118631119.full (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nas:journl:v:119:y:2022:p:e2118631119

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by PNAS Product Team ().