Lead poisoning, the silent killer of children's dreams

A universal lead screening for pre-school and school-aged children and a lead education programme for parents are recommended for implementation in Kenya.

I recently had a very chilling unusual conversation with a colleague who we were neighbours as young doctors living in the doctors flats.

He shared with me his current predicament of poor performance in school and behavioural challenges of his first two children.

He intimated to me that after conducting extensive personal research, including testing his children’s blood, he concluded that his children might be victims of lead poisoning. We recalled vividly the old paint on the staircase that used to peel off and there was always dusty particles of paint and dust on the staircase that we’d complain about.

Samples of the dust had since been collected and tested and found to be very high in lead — and that was the source of poisoning.

Now you know why this conversation was chilling to me. Many families of doctors still live in those blocks and nothing has changed.

The consequences of brain injury from exposure to lead in early life are loss of intelligence, shortening of attention span and disruption of behaviour.

Because the human brain has little capacity for repair, these effects cannot be treated and remain irreversible.

Lead poisoning also causes diminution in brain function and reduction in achievement that lasts throughout life. Worse still, there appears to be no threshold level below which lead causes no injury to the developing human brain.

So, lead poisoning — the silent killer of dreams — has set many children on a potential path to failure before they have even finished kindergarten.

The problem is not a new one, we have known about it for decades. Our children have been poisoned from our doctor’s quarters, and it is entirely preventable.

Unfortunately, our response has remained stubbornly reactionary rather than preventive, piecemeal rather than comprehensive, and almost wholly dependent on civil society environmental activists.

A universal lead screening for pre-school and school-aged children and a lead education programme for parents are recommended for implementation in Kenya.