Like thousands of workers across the country, Joseph Thompson thought the smelter fumes from pouring molten metal ingots were harmless wisps.
“They tell you to wear your respirator at all times,” said Thompson, a supervisor at H. Kramer & Co. on Chicago’s West Side. “Sometimes we’d say we’re not making anything but lead,” and forget to wear safety devices that prevent inhaling toxic fumes.
“It was my fault,” Thompson, 58, said softly. “I’m the supervisor. I’m supposed to tell everybody to wear respirators. I’ve got five guys on my shift. Several of them had high (lead) levels.”
For decades, public health officials focused their attention on childhood lead poisoning. Now, with the primary causes of childhood lead poisoning reduced, officials are discovering another big group of people has been getting poisoned: industrial employees.
And federal and state data show the number of occupational lead-poisoning cases growing.
The trend, linked to casual concern or indifference among workers as well as better medical diagnoses, is especially troubling because lead was first recognized as an occupational hazard thousands of years ago.
“It’s a serious problem,” said Joseph Dear, director of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. “We’ve got to be able to deal with this one,” since the causes of lead poisoning and how to avoid it are fully understood.
This summer, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta reported a 10 percent rise nationally in reports of adults with high levels of lead in their blood, comparing the first quarter of 1995 with the same period a year earlier.
Illinois Department of Public Health figures show an even bigger jump. The state logged 2,231 cases of adult lead poisoning in 1994, up 43 percent from 1993. This is based on results from medical laboratories that report to the state when they find high lead levels in blood samples taken in routine medical examinations.
While the number of cases is up, experts believe poisonings today often are less severe because of earlier detection. For example, Thompson says he never felt ill, and the level of lead in his blood and in his co-workers’ fell after they began wearing respirators.
But the ailments can be severe. Repeated exposures to lead cause the metal to accumulate in the blood, body organs and bones, resulting at first in flu-like symptoms such as fatigue and headaches. Extreme lead poisoning causes muscle and joint pains, memory loss, convulsions, coma or death.
Lead has been used for 6,000 years, starting with the Egyptians, who used it for pottery glazing and pipes.
The element-No. 82 in the periodic table-is soft and widely used in metal alloys to make them easier to mold and machine. U.S. foundries alone produce more than $25 billion in castings each year, and employ 230,000 people.
Lead also is a vital component in 120 occupational areas such as autos, electronics, plumbing, paints, batteries, tank linings, radiation shielding and bullets. High-exposure industries are smelters and auto battery manufacturers and recyclers.
As a result, an estimated 900,000 workers in the U.S. are exposed to lead on the job, either by inhaling airborne fumes or swallowing lead dust with food, liquids or while smoking.
Controlling lead through technology, such as ventilation, can cost a company millions of dollars, but it also involves common sense and careful attention to work habits to avoid contamination, such as wearing a respirator.
But as adult lead poisoning rises, Dear says his agency is targeting companies that willfully disregard lead exposure hazards to workers and choose “to avoid the expense of complying with the (lead exposure) standards. That is what gets us into large enforcement cases.”
OSHA has fined companies $22.9 million for 11,963 lead violations at workplaces since 1990. Among these companies were two from the Chicago area this year.
In June, Midwest Metallics L.P., the largest auto-scrap dealer in the Midwest with more than 200 employees, agreed to pay $1 million in fines for safety violations, including exposing employees to airborne lead exposures as high as 24 times the permissible limit at its McCook plant.
Argo-based Midwest Metallics operates scrap yards in Joliet, McCook, Argo and on Chicago’s South Side.
Two months earlier, OSHA socked Chicago Faucet Co. in Des Plaines with $162,000 in proposed penalties involving 21 workplace safety and health violations.
OSHA cited Chicago Faucet for a 13-count willful violation on March 31, for example, when air sampling found that 10 polishers and other workers were exposed to airborne lead exposures that were as much as 5.6 times the federal limit.
The agency said its inspectors also saw Chicago Faucet workers using an air hose or brooms and shovels to remove lead dust from work areas instead of vacuuming as required.
Chicago Faucet would not comment on the complaint, except to say it is contesting the fine.
Federal and state authorities soon may be forced to curb their lead programs, however.
Under a spending bill passed by the House this month, OSHA’s budget would shrink by $50 million, and the measure specifically mandates a one-third cut in the agency’s enforcement budget beginning Oct. 1.
At the same date, Illinois will shut down its lead registry because the federal grant that has funded the program since 1990 has run out.
“It means more workers will die or be injured,” contends OSHA spokeswoman Cheryl Byrne. “It is sending the message to employers that Congress is legislating no enforcement” of health and safety regulations.
Because of the nation’s long history of industrial pollution, most people have about 2.8 micrograms of lead in their blood from their surroundings. It was higher before the federal government banned lead in gasoline in the 1970s.
OSHA considers bodily lead levels too high when they reach 25 micrograms or more per deciliter of blood. A worker must be removed from a job involving lead exposure when the blood lead content reaches 50 micrograms. Limits also are set for airborne lead concentrations in the workplace.
These standards have helped to reduce worker exposures, says Mike Wright, head of health, safety and environment for the United Steelworkers of America in Pittsburgh, which represents thousands of lead workers.
“The biggest remaining problem is lead in construction,” said Wright, such as bridge repairs requiring sand blasting, which causes a storm of lead paint dust that can be inhaled. “People get very high blood-lead levels very rapidly” in those conditions.
Illinois ranks third in the number of adult lead-poisoning victims among the 23 states reporting such cases to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, with 1,105 instances of lead poisoning in 1994.
Since the 1960s, Chicago’s health department has focused on lead poisoning in children, although department spokesman Tim Hadac points to links of childhood lead poisoning with the workplace. He recalls a case involving a little girl.
Coming home from work, her father unknowingly had lead dust in his beard. “She would kiss him and play with his beard, then put her hands in her mouth,” said Hadec. “Through his beard, she was being poisoned.”
“The whole trick with handling lead is personal hygiene,” insists Lewis Edelstein, a partner in Ames Metal Co. on the Southwest Side. “Wash your hands so you don’t eat it.”
Ames was among companies identified by the Illinois Department of Public Health as repeatedly having employees with excessive blood-lead levels. The others were Mueller Co. in Decatur and North Chicago Refiners & Smelters in North Chicago.
Edelstein pins the company’s problem on a single worker who he says repeatedly had high lead levels because “the guy was basically a pig.” Workers are advised against eating or drinking in the workplace, or taking tainted work clothes home.
Midwest Metallics and North Chicago Refiners & Smelters say they are reducing lead exposures through better ventilation, worker education and consistent use of respirators. North Chicago Refiners says it spent $8 million between 1987 and 1995 to control lead exposures.
Officials at Mueller decline to comment. On May 23, OSHA air sampling found six workers at Mueller exposed to airborne lead concentrations that were 1.8 to 12.7 times the federal limit.
Once a repeat violator, GNB Technologies Inc. in Kankakee, which manufactures industrial batteries, now is regarded by OSHA as a model in curbing lead exposures by changing equipment, production methods and work procedures.
“We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in continuing efforts to keep (lead) low,” said plant engineer Vic Wieliczko.
“We listen to employee concerns and get equipment for ventilation. Some work habits are hard to break. We try to educate them on the hazards of working around a lead environment.”
With about 275 workers, the company’s plantwide blood-lead level average in 1985 was 44.6 micrograms per deciliter.
By July, the plantwide average was 20.3. OSHA called this “truly exemplary.”
