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For those new to the Lead Safe Mama website:

Tamara Rubin is a multiple-federal-award-winning independent advocate for childhood Lead poisoning prevention and consumer goods safety, and a documentary filmmaker. She is also a mother of Lead-poisoned children (two of her four sons were acutely Lead-poisoned in 2005).

• Tamara owns and runs Lead Safe Mama, LLC — a unique community collaborative woman-owned small business for childhood Lead poisoning prevention and consumer goods safety.
• Since July of 2022, the work of Lead Safe Mama, LLC has been responsible for five product recalls (FDA and CPSC).
• Please check out our press page to see some of the amazing coverage of our work so far this year!

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This is an ad-free article.

Advertising and affiliate income help Lead Safe Mama, LLC cover the costs of the work we do here (independent consumer goods testing and childhood Lead-poisoning prevention advocacy). We have removed ads from most of our more widely-read articles (like this one!) to make them easier for you to read. In addition to supporting this work by starting any shopping you might be doing with a click on our affiliate links (for Lead-free products), if you would like to support the independent consumer goods testing and childhood Lead-poisoning prevention advocacy work of Lead Safe Mama, LLC by making a contribution (which will also help us keep our more widely-read articles ad-free), click here. Thank you!

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Published: June 2, 2024
Sunday

For many, “The American Dream” includes buying a home, raising their children in that home, and (many summers) working together as a family — spending hours fixing-up that home to make it perfect/ make it better for the family (for the kids… and later on, the grandkids!).

For families living in homes built before the 1978 restriction on Lead in house-paint, this often means that those very summer tasks — which may include renovations, repairs, and/or repainting the family homestead — expose the children living in the home to Lead dust at levels that (while often invisible to the naked eye) are poisonous enough to change those children’s lives forever.

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Section #1)
More families renovate their homes in the summer 

The reasons more families renovate their homes in the summer span a full range of considerations, most related to weather, job commitments (time off from work), and childcare opportunities (or lack-thereof). Some of the reasons include:

• One parent may have time off work in the summer to stay home with the children (who are home from school), so they can also be home to coordinate home improvement projects they are doing themselves, or oversee the work of contractors.
• In parts of the world with snow or frequent rain in the fall, winter, and spring, the summer season becomes the best time to accomplish bigger projects that may not be possible when stormy weather could impact the work. 
• Days are longer (more sunlight), so there’s more time to tackle bigger projects, too (including families who might only have weekends and evenings after work for these types of projects). Longer days also leave more time for paint to dry, which is especially important on larger paint jobs and exterior paint jobs.

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Section #2)
Most families who currently live in pre-1978 fixer-upper homes are not aware of the extreme dangers commonly created during home renovation

Families buying (or renting) historic homes that need work (“fixer uppers”) are typically not aware of the potential significant Lead hazards presented by renovating a pre-1978 home. This is often because the families who are more likely to be in the income bracket to buy (or rent) a home in need of work are typically younger families — including newlyweds, families expecting children soon, families with young children and newborns, or single-parent families — with a full plate of other considerations (regarding parenting and work) still to manage…

Given it is now 2024, these young adults/ young parents/ parents-to-be were often born well after the 1978 restriction on Lead in paint (the 1978 federal law that required house paint applied in areas a child could reach to not have more than 600 ppm Lead). This means they often are completely unaware of the profound dangers their “dream home” might put their family through (both short-term and long-term) when disturbing legacy Lead paint is present.

Lead-paint hazards in “fixer upper” older homes can either be from a still-visible original top layer of paint (which is rare, but possible) or, more often, are lurking below one or more subsequently-applied layers of harmless-looking modern (normally latex) paint.

Important to note: Lead-based paint consisted of Lead mixed in with linseed oil back in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, etc. As a result, unsafe levels of Lead have actually seeped into the wood on any Lead-painted surfaces in homes of that era (Lead is carried into the wood grain as the linseed oil infiltrates the cellular structure). So even wood that has been “fully-stripped ‘bare,'” then stained, sealed, or repainted, typically still has unsafe levels of Lead remaining within the actual grain of the wood. Separately, “unpainted” wood with original stain from that era may also test positive for unsafe levels of Lead on the surface (you can read more about that here).

Many people currently renting or buying older homes mistakenly think (based on the news cycles within their lifetime) that the risk of Lead-exposure is primarily associated with Lead in water (like in the Flint water crisis) rather than Lead in paint. The concern for Lead exposure and poisoning risks from Lead paint dust in homes has been de-emphasized — even omitted — as a primary concern in more-recent news cycles. Journalists have steered away from this concern in recent years thanks to a common notion that incidents of Lead-poisoning from inhalation or hand-to-mouth transfer ingestion of Lead microdust from deteriorating or disturbed Lead paint is somehow “a thing of the past” — a problem we supposedly “solved” nearly 50 years ago — which is simply not true!

To learn more about testing the water in your home, click here.

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Section #3)
It literally takes just a microscopic amount of Lead in dust to poison a human being

• Here’s an article explaining exactly how little Lead it takes to poison a human.
• Here’s a short video illustrating that same point.

Exposure to Lead-contaminated microdust from renovating (or simply repainting) a pre-1978 home, especially while living in that home with children (no matter how careful you think you might be with typical precautions for dust containment, debris transport and disposal, clean-up, etc.) is the most common way children are Lead-poisoned in the summer.

Even if a family moves out of the home and does not return until after the work is done — steps which definitely should be taken — the residents of the home are still likely to be Lead-poisoned from dust left behind by the work unless thorough Lead-focused cleaning is initiated upon completion of the work, followed up by “clearance testing” using dust wipe samples collected in a specific manner and sent to a lab for quantitative testing. Only after test results confirming and detailing that the home has PASSED a clearance test (“less than 5 micrograms of Lead per square foot”) can the family safely return to the home. (Read more about that here.)

Here’s a little (silly?) video that shows how to carefully clean up Lead dust in a home.

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Section #4)
Given the above considerations, historically, there is typically a significant increase in the diagnosis of Lead-poisoning cases in August and September

With renovation and repainting projects heavily concentrated in the summer — especially in areas with cold winters, which also happen to be areas with lots of older housing stock (like New England, Chicago, Ohio, Minnesota, and the Pacific Northwest) — there’s a significant correlative increase in diagnosed cases of Lead-poisoning in August and September.

After many children have been exposed to Lead microdust as a result of the summer renovation of their older (i.e. pre-1978) home, Lead-poisoning is often discovered during the “back-to-school” pediatric check-ups required for children to enter daycare, preschool, kindergarten, or first grade. Most of these medical exams happen at the end of summer, just before the beginning of the school year (August/ September), as that is a requirement in many school districts (and parents typically wait until the last moment for these medical checkups due to reluctance to schedule doctors’ exams for their kids in the middle of their summer plans).

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Section #5)
Symptoms of “The Summer Disease”

In the summer, symptoms of Lead exposure that are subtle may go undiagnosed (or misdiagnosed/ undiagnosed as being linked to Lead-exposure) because typical summer activities often disrupt a child’s normal schedule, which in turn can impact their behavior/ temperament. 

Doctors (especially doctors not sufficiently educated in the sometimes subtle initial symptomatic presentation of a Lead exposure) often dismiss many of those symptoms of Lead exposure as either being “insignificant” or as being isolated symptoms, not recognizing them as any indication of a potentially serious condition or illness (especially if multiple common/ mild symptoms are not considered together). Thus, doctors are not prompting any urgency or inquiry into possible causation by anything specific in the child’s environment or routine; this is especially the case because symptoms of Lead exposure do not typically include a fever.

A good illustration of this: A child might have a headache for instance, and might also not be sleeping well.

• • A doctor uneducated in the symptomatic expression of Lead exposure might not evaluate these two symptoms together.
    • That doctor might conclude that the child “most likely has a headache from dehydration, or from spending too much time in the sun.”
    • This doctor may separately conclude the child is not sleeping well simply because of “a disrupted routine,” or “too much excitement” from all the summer activities, ultimately making an assumption that the child “may just be going through a growth spurt.”
  • A doctor educated in understanding the symptoms of Lead exposure would (hopefully) evaluate those two symptoms as possibly linked.
    • This doctor would (again, hopefully) ask the parents some pro-forma screening questions about the child’s home environment, the age of the child’s home, whether there have been any recent renovations in the home, etc. to determine if there might be a potential source of Lead exposure.
    • Based on possible risk factors revealed in the answers to these questions, the doctor would then order a (simple and inexpensive!) Blood Lead Level test (to rule out Lead exposure).
  • You can read more about blood Lead testing at this link.

It is important to note, however, that the most common symptom of childhood Lead-poisoning is often no immediate or obvious symptoms at all. The classic learning disabilities and behavioral disorders linked to Lead exposure do not typically fully present until years after the initial exposure, as the impacts on areas of the brain that play critical roles in many cognitive processes — particularly impulse control and executive function — only become obvious with atypical neurologic development and function over time as those areas build-out and continue developing throughout childhood, teenage years, and on into the mid-twenties.

However, if a child has an acute/ incident-related exposure (especially as might happen in the case of exposure to very high-Lead-content dust or other direct Lead exposure hazards created during renovations, which is exactly what happened with my children in the summer of 2005) they might experience one or more (even, in the case of my own children, all!) of the following symptoms:

• Headaches
• Tummy-aches 
• Constipation
• Diarrhea 
• Constipation and diarrhea alternating without a dietary explanation
• Explosive diarrhea
• Vomiting
• Speech regression (including the cessation of speech development in young children who have just started to speak)
• Irritability (often misdiagnosed as “simply the terrible twos”)
• Difficulty sleeping/ differences in sleep patterns (including excessive sleepiness, or unwillingness to sleep/ unwillingness to sleep alone for younger babies and toddlers)
• Night terrors (a child either asleep — not conscious — or awake in the middle of the night who is expressing upset, crying or screaming without any apparent reason)
• “Growing pains” (joint pain, leg paint, muscle pain, and cramps)
• Changes in appetite (including a refusal to eat at all or refusal to eat their typical diet)

While these symptoms are more common with acute exposure, some mix from this cluster of symptoms can also be present with persistent low-level/ chronic exposure (as might happen if a child continues to live in a home with Lead-dust that never passed a clearance test after a renovation has been completed — and after the home has been ostensibly “cleaned” but not using Lead-specific protocols). 

Significantly, in most cases, the above symptoms (on their own/isolated, or with a group being experienced simultaneously) will present without a fever. A doctor (or other healthcare professional) unfamiliar with Lead exposure symptoms may be unconcerned and describe a child’s illness as “flu-like” but absent a fever, offering their assumption that “it’s just some minor bug that will pass.”

You can read more information about symptoms by following these links:

• Symptoms in children
• Symptoms in adults
• Impacts on fertility

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Section #6)
How to protect your family from Lead-poisoning in the summer (and year-round)

• Watch our documentary film. The film has been specifically designed as a crash course on the issue of childhood Lead-poisoning and its prevention. You can watch it (for free) at this link. It is 92-minutes long.
  • I actually teach state (or city) health-department sponsored classes in which doctors, nurses, and educators get Continuing Education Credits (CEUs) for attending.
  • In these classes, we show this film and follow-up the film screening with a panel discussion of experts (medical, scientific, legal, construction experts, and others).
  • If your doctor is not onboard with your concerns for your child’s exposure, you can also encourage them to watch this film!
• Always make sure to hire only EPA RRP-certified contractors for any work on a home built before 1978.
  • Ask to see the contractor’s certificate and make sure it is current (not expired) before agreeing to hire them.
• Move out of your home prior to any repairs, renovations, or repainting on a pre-1978 home.
  • If possible, here’s an even better scenario: Do not move into a newly-purchased (or newly rented/ recently renovated) pre-1978 home until after all the work has been completed, and until after the home has passed a clearance test.
• If you are already living in the home: Furniture (and other personal items) should be moved out so they are not contaminated with micro-dust from any repair, renovation, or painting work (contractors always make mistakes as Lead dust is very difficult to contain, so you should move forward with the project taking precautions, anticipating some mistakes will be made).
• After any repair, renovation or repainting work has been completed (and before you move in/ move back in) you should ALWAYS request a clearance testing.
  • Clearance testing is scientific testing completed by an independent third-party contractor to determine if there are any active Lead dust hazards in the home.
  • You can complete a preliminary screening clearance testing yourself for as little as $75. Here’s an article with more information about clearance testing/ dust-wipe sampling.
  • Again, do not move back into the home until you have confirmed your house passes clearance testing.

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Section #7)
For those reading this article who are in the middle of a renovation or who just completed a renovation

If, after reading this article, you are concerned that you may have exposed your children to Lead dust as a result of a summer renovation (or a renovation any time of year), we recommend the following steps:

1. Watch the film: The opening is emotional but the film is solidly rooted in science and features fascinating and empowering interviews with experts across a wide range of fields and disciplines, from historians and scientists to medical professionals, Lead paint remediation experts, and more. The film will give you the information you need to move forward safely with your situation. Here’s that link again.
2. Get your children tested immediately. You may also want to get yourself tested, too. Read this article for more information.
3. Read this article about natural (whole food-based) detox (including the linked scientific studies at the bottom of the article).
4. Please also consider joining the Lead Poisoning Prevention with Lead Safe Mama Facebook Group — it’s a great place to ask questions and find other people who are going through similar situations.

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