Opinion ID: 1787304
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: The Pigment Manufacturers and the Lead Industries Association (LIA)[24]

Text: ¶ 64. In 1928, the rising alarms regarding the hazards of lead and the need for coordination among lead producers and manufacturers led to the formation of the Lead Industries Association (LIA). Although comprised of many lead industries, the white lead industry was the most important of the lead manufacturing industries in the LIA. ¶ 65. Virtually from its inception, the LIA was responding to what it termed undesirable publicity regarding lead poisoning. In 1930, the LIA's Secretary, stated that of late we have received much undeserved publicity in newspapers damaging to lead products. By 1939, the LIA acknowledged that the large amount of space given to lead by medical columnists in the daily press by the medical profession, by consumer organizations and by authors of scientific subjects has increased the amount of attention that we have had to give to [the] subject of lead toxicology in 1939. That same year, the LIA initiated its large-scale White Lead Promotion Campaign. By 1941, the LIA complained that [l]ead poisoning matters continue to absorb a large amount of time of the Association . . . . In response to this negative publicity, the Secretary proposed a program of vigorously investigating each alleged case that arises, taking any remedial steps if necessary, encouraging medical research in lead poisoning, and publishing literature showing the useful role of lead in industry. Through the end of the 1940s, the LIA determined that the problem of lead hygiene could be addressed by reassuring the public that lead was safe. Addressing this problem was, in the LIA's own estimation, one of the most important activities of the Lead Industries Association as there remains an appalling amount of prejudice against the use of lead products based on fancied notions of lead toxicity. ¶ 66. According to Markowitz and Rosner, the LIA's campaign was multi-pronged: it sought to rebut any research findings or other news of lead's toxicity; it sponsored its own research to demonstrate that lead was harmless; and it refused to warn the public of lead's dangers, even in the face of overwhelming evidence from research and clinical findings that many children were dying. All the while, Markowitz and Rosner submit, the LIA promoted the use of lead paint and successfully lobbied against laws and regulations that would curb its use. Although the Pigment Manufacturers, through the LIA, were not actively hiding information regarding the dangers of lead poisoning, particularly in children, they were very well aware of the information, and they were accumulating it. ¶ 67. One of the key voices for the LIA in critiquing the growing scientific literature on the toxicity of lead was that of Dr. Joseph Aub. Prior to the LIA, the lead industry was organized under the American Institute of Lead Manufacturers. The Institute funded medical research on the toxicity of lead at Harvard University under the direction of Aub. The LIA continued that research from 1929-45 to help rebut findings of lead poisoning. Aub's research focused on lead metabolism in adults from occupational exposures, not on child lead poisoning. However, in 1937, during an LIA sponsored confidential conference on lead poisoning for the physicians employed by its member companies (including National Lead, Sherwin-Williams, Glidden, and Anaconda/IS&R), Aub acknowledged the vulnerability of children with respect to lead poisoning. [25] ¶ 68. The LIA attached inestimable importance to Aub's research: Without the counsel he has given this office and active assistance in some of our lead problems, we would indeed be at a serious disadvantage. Aub was called upon to rebut treating physicians' reports of lead poisoning deaths by providing alternative exculpatory explanations. ¶ 69. In contrast to Aub's downplaying lead paint's hazards, another prominent industry-sponsored researcher, Dr. Robert Kehoe, consistently warned of the hazards lead paint posed to children, although such warnings remained largely confined to private correspondences. Kehoe's research was financed by the Ethyl Corporation, which produced tetraethyl lead for gasoline. ¶ 70. By the 1930s, Kehoe agreed with the broader medical community that toys, cribs, furniture, as well as woodwork and any other painted surfaces in children's reach were possible sources of child lead poisoning. In 1933, Kehoe highlighted the disparate impact lead poisoning had on children and adults and stressed that strenuous efforts must be devoted to eliminating lead from [children's] environment. In 1935, he again expressed his belief that [t]he occurrence of lead-containing commodities and the use of lead paints on furniture, toys, and other objects, within the reach of small children is much too common to ignore. [26] ¶ 71. In 1944, after Byers and Lord's publication on the effects of lead on long-term intellectual development, the LIA wrote to Kehoe, acknowledging that if their conclusions were correct, we have indeed a most serious public health hazard. Kehoe responded, writing: I fear that you will be disappointed by my answer, for I am disposed to agree with the conclusions arrived at by the authors, and to believe that their evidence, if not entirely adequate, is worthy of very serious consideration. Perhaps my own experience prejudices me in favor of the acceptance of their findings, for I have seen cases of serious mental retardation in children that have recovered from lead poisoning of the encephalopathic type, and among my records is one case of permanent feeble mindedness which I attribute to a well defined episode of lead encephalopathy in an infant. . . . . You quarrel with the statement about chewing paint and say that the manufacturers don't use it on cribs and toys. That may well be true. My experience leads me to accept it as such. However, the householder repaints these articles, and often with lead-containing paints. Please note that the article makes point of the fact that the children chewed paint off cribs, window sills or furniture, and also refers to the statement of parents that they had repainted cribs. I'm afraid it will do you no good to try to combat the significance of the history of chewing articles in relation to the problem of lead poisoning in children. The most significant feature of the history of exposure in an overwhelming proportion of the cases of lead poisoning in children is just that fact. Pica is at the bottom of most of these cases, and unfortunately the environment of small children is not sufficiently free of lead for their safety. Have you seen the data on lead poisoning in children in Queensland[, Australia]? These cases were largely due to chewing the paint off the railings of the porches on which the children played. ¶ 72. With reassurances from Aub, the LIA disagreed with Kehoe's assessment, stating: [I]t has not been conclusively proven and, the case made out by Drs. Byers and Lord that there is a connection between retarded mental development in later years and lead poisoning itself, is far from proven. As Dr. Aub told me, he felt that children who have . . . the disease known as pica which caused them to chew on inedible articles, were subnormal to start with! ¶ 73. Despite assurances from the LIA that children's toys no longer contained lead paint, the U.S. Children's Bureau warned in December 1945 that [i]t is not safe to take the word of the salesman as to whether [a paint] is harmless or not because he may not know. According to Markowitz and Rosner, The LIA did not advocate the use of warning labels, nor did it encourage the elimination of interior use of white lead. Only these measures could have served to diminish or eliminate the problem. To the contrary, . . . the LIA and its members continued to promote lead paint for interior use. Sherwin-Williams and Glidden actually still promoted lead paint for use on toys at this time. ¶ 74. Also in December 1945, the LIA launched The Safety and Hygiene Program to undercut the growing medical literature regarding the toxicity of lead that it characterized as faulty. Recognizing that the lead industry must be losing a vast amount of business each year because of the fact that lead has such unpleasant connections in the minds of so many Americans, the LIA persisted in complaining about how the lead industry continues to be plagued unfairly by attacks made upon lead products because of their toxicity and indicated it would meet attacks on lead due to its toxic qualities by correcting published erroneous statements. ¶ 75. In 1946, to counter the findings of Byers and Lord, the LIA organized a conference on lead poisoning with the American Medical Association. At the conference, the LIA strongly rejected claims that lead was dangerous. The LIA Secretary rebuked a doctor's account of how a child's crib was traced to three cases of lead poisoning. According to the Secretary, interior white paint no longer contained lead, and thus he denied the importance of lead poisoning in children due to paint. ¶ 76. Kehoe still disagreed with the LIA Secretary's assessment, stating: More lead poisoning in children has occurred than we would like to think about. The number that are actually reported in medical literature have very little relationship to the number that actually occur. Lead poisoning in a child is a serious disease. ¶ 77. Moreover, Markowitz and Rosner also note that the LIA and the Pigment Manufacturers continued to promote and sell white lead paints for interior use well after the mid 1940s. In addition, in their estimation, by this date it was abundantly clear that hundreds of children were dying of lead poisoning each year. ¶ 78. Kehoe later reviewed a report written by the LIA Secretary that iterated the benign qualities of lead, and Kehoe warned the LIA against taking this extreme position. In particular, Kehoe objected to the LIA Secretary's denial of the importance of lead poisoning in children due to lead paint, stressing that the connection between childhood lead poisoning and lead paint was sound. A few years later, in 1953, Kehoe recommended largely eliminating use of lead paints for interiors to protect children: [The] most effective solution of this problem . . . [is] to eliminate the use of paints . . . of more than very minor lead content for all inside decoration in the household and in the environment of young children. If this is not done voluntarily by a wise industry concerned to handle its own business properly, it will be accomplished ineffectually and with irrelevant difficulties and disadvantages through legislation. The LIA did not accept his proposal. ¶ 79. By the late 1940's, Markowitz and Rosner submit that warning the public of the dangers of lead was still out of the question for the LIA. In 1948, after comparisons between the toxicity of lead and zinc products were being published, the LIA formalized its informal agreement with the American Zinc Industry that prevented the Zinc Industry from advertising the toxicity of lead-based paints. ¶ 80. In 1955, the LIA characterized the problem of childhood lead poisoning as a major `headache' and a source of much adverse publicity. The LIA wrote: With us, childhood lead poisoning is common enough to constitute perhaps my major headache, this being in part due to the very poor prognosis in many such cases, and also to the fact that the only real remedy lies in educating a relatively ineducable category of parents. It is mainly a slum problem with us, estimated by Kehoe to run into four figures annually, and [] we have no monopoly on either substandard housing or substandard mentalities in the USA. . . . ¶ 81. Shortly thereafter, the American Standards Association, a voluntary group comprised of representatives from a variety of medical, public health and industry groups (including the LIA and NPVLA), developed a standard to minimize hazards to children. This new standard provided that paint used for interiors or any surface that children might chew on should contain no more than one percent lead by weight. Prior to that time, the LIA indicated it made [e]very effort . . . to confine the regulatory measures . . . to the field of warning labels, which, as applied to paints, are obviously less detrimental to our interests than would be any legislation of a prohibitory nature. ¶ 82. Two years later, in 1957, the LIA finally recognized what the literature had supported for nearly half a century: lead paint was the major source of childhood lead poisoning. The LIA also recognized the problems of lead paint causing lead poisoning was going to be a lasting one. However, the LIA still was displacing blame. This time, the LIA suggested the blame fell on the children's parents' shoulders, as it stated: As the major source of trouble is the flaking of lead paint in the ancient slum dwellings of our older cities, the problem of lead poisoning in children will be with us for as long as there are slums, and because of the high death rate, the frequency of permanent brain damage in the survivors, and the intelligence level of the slum parents, it seems destined to remain as important and as difficult as any with which we have to deal. ¶ 83. In a letter to Kehoe towards the end of 1957, the LIA similarly acknowledged the problem yet cast blame elsewhere, writing: Without fear of successful contravention, I can say: 1. That the overwhelming major source of lead poisoning in children is from structural lead paints chewed from painted surfaces, picked up or off in the form of flakes, or adhering to bits of plaster and subsequently ingested. 2. That of some, but secondary importance is lead paint mistakenly applied by ignorant parents to cribs, play pens and other juvenile furniture and subsequently chewed off and ingested. 3. That any poisoning that there may be from lead-painted toys is of quite minor concern in comparison with the two above sources. 4. That childhood lead poisoning is essentially a problem of slum dwellings and relatively ignorant parents. 5. That it is almost wholly confined to the older cities of the eastern third of the country and is practically nonexistent west of Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis and New Orleans. 6. That, in all too many cases, the slum child, diagnosed, hospitalized and cured, returns to the same environment and to another routine of lead paint ingestion. 7. That the importance of the problem lies primarily, not in the number of cases, but in the likelihood of permanent brain damage and in the great difficulty of instituting really effective preventive measures. 8. That, until we can find means to (a) get rid of our slums, and (b) educate the relatively ineducable parent, the problem will continue to plague us. 9. And finally that, if you know the answer to those two, you are even more of a genius than I think you. Perhaps this letter is just another instance of carrying coals to Newcastle, but the misunderstanding of the fundamentals of this problem is so widespread, and frequently where one would least expect it, that I find myself impelled to sound off in this fashion once in so often. Although less than unassuming, the lead industry at least finally acknowledged what researchers had been confirming for decades. ¶ 84. The LIA still saw the problem as a headache and a public relations issue, not a public health disaster. In 1959, in its annual report, the LIA wrote: The toxicity of lead poses a problem that other nonferrous industries generally do not have to face. Lead poisoning, or the threat of it, hurts our business in several different ways. While it is difficult to count exactly in dollars and cents, it is taking money out of your pockets every day. In the first place, it means thousands of items of unfavorable publicity every year. This is particularly true since most cases of lead poisoning today are in children, and anything sad that happens to a child is meat for newspaper editors and is gobbled up by the public. It makes no difference that it is essentially a problem of slums, a public welfare problem. Just the same the publicity hits us where it hurts. Secondly, it means that we are often subjected to unnecessarily onerous regulations, either in the use of our product or in its labeling. This may mean either an added expense in labeling or in control equipment in your or your customers' plants. It may even mean that your product won't be used at all because your potential customer doesn't want the problems that the use of lead may involve. ¶ 85. By 1972, the LIA now characterized the problems of childhood lead poisoning as harrowing. The LIA recognized that childhood lead poisoning was not limited to urban slums but also reached young children in small towns and rural areas. Further, the LIA recognized that childhood lead poisoning could not be attributed to defective children, as it had earlier believed, because young children . . . will often taste anything that gets into their hands.