by Angelo DePalma, Ph.D., Childrens Health Defense:
The health and economic effects of lead exposure may be 6-7 times higher than previously estimated, according to a report in The Lancet Planetary Health.
The report found that the magnitude of environmental risk from lead exposure is similar to that of fine-particulate air pollution and exceeds risks associated with unsafe drinking and household-use water.
The researchers were looking for IQ loss among children under 5, heart disease deaths and the lifetime economic impacts of both.
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The study
Bjorn Larsen, an analyst at the World Bank, who led the study, used established risk estimates for blood-lead levels from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (GBD).
According to Larsen, the average IQ loss in low- to medium-income families during the five-year observational period — 5.9 points per child — was 80% higher than previous estimates.
Based on an income reduction of about 2% per lost IQ point, Larsen estimated the lifetime income loss at 11.8%.
This translates to an annual global income loss of $2.4 trillion, or 1.6% of global gross domestic product (GDP). As a share of GDP, the burden was highest in low-income countries and lowest in high-income countries.
Since lead exposure is a risk factor for heart disease Larsen used GBD data to calculate the effects of lifetime lead exposure on cardiovascular deaths. He estimated that lead exposure caused 5.5 million cardiovascular deaths globally in 2019.
In its original analysis, GBD had estimated just 0.85 million deaths.
As many as 5 million global deaths (90.2%) occurred in low- and middle-income countries, and 93.1% of those were in modest households in upper-middle-income countries.
Costs associated with these deaths were $4.6 trillion, but the uncertainty in this calculation was large. Low- and middle-income countries accounted for 54% of global cardiovascular deaths.
The estimated cost equaled 5.3% of global GDP in 2019, but no pattern emerged linking relative cost burdens to a country’s economic ranking.
Together, the cost of IQ loss plus cardiovascular deaths was $6.0 trillion, or about 6.9% of global GDP.
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