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EPA Exercises Leadership

December 15, 2006

Back in the 1920s, fuel company workers who blended lead into gasoline called the toxic mixture “loony gas.”

Aren’t we glad the days of widespread airborne lead poisoning are safely in the past? Like polio epidemics and measles outbreaks, it is a scourge we are well rid of.

Or are we? The Environmental Protection Agency has released a draft issue paper that leaves the door open to repealing the national health standard for airborne lead. Yes, lead, which poisoned the air breathed by millions of people for decades until a more independent, less political EPA ordered the insidious neurotoxin removed from motor gasoline.

We can thank the Nixon and Ford-era EPA Administrators William Ruckelshaus and Russell Train for taking the steps that gave Americans lead-free gasoline for cars. (Small amounts of leaded gasoline are still sold for propeller-driven airplanes.)

The lead phaseout, after decades of foot-dragging and bloody-minded denial regarding its dangers to human health, was one of the past century’s great public health success stories. The benefits of getting the lead out have been remarkable. Blood lead levels in children fell more than 90 percent between 1983 and 2002. Pregnant women no longer need to worry that every breath of air they take will dose their developing babies with brain-addling poison and increase the risks of miscarriage.

Apparently, no good deed goes unpunished. EPA may propose the removal of the lead standard sometime next summer. To comment on EPA's bizarre idea, send an e-mail to EPA or a fax to 202-566-1741. Deadline for comments on the issue paper is February 5, 2007.

EPA’s air quality chief insists that the agency will continue to reduce lead emissions. If that’s supposed to be reassuring, the tin-eared successors to Bill Ruckelshaus and Russell Train have a lot to learn.