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‘We’re losing IQ points’: the lead poisoning crisis unfolding among US children
美国儿童铅中毒危机:“我们的智商正在下降”
Nine-year-old Turokk Dow loves spelling, airplanes and basketball. He is learning to read and write in his third grade classroom. But suffering from extreme blood lead poisoning at age 3 – with lead levels nearly ten times the EPA action level – has hugely exacerbated the already-substantial challenges in his young life. As a toddler, he had to be rushed to the hospital and started on months of “chelation” treatments to soak up the lead in his body. These involved making him swallow a liquid that his mom said “smelled and tasted like rotten eggs”.
九岁的托洛克·陶喜欢拼写、飞机和篮球。他正在三年级的教室里学习阅读和写作。但他在3岁时就患上了严重的血铅中毒——血铅含量几乎是美国环保署（EPA）标准的10倍——这极大地加剧了他年轻生活中本已严峻的挑战。当他还是个蹒跚学步的孩子时，他被紧急送往医院，开始接受数月的“螯合”治疗，以吸收体内的铅。这些措施包括让他吞下一种液体，他的妈妈说，这种液体“闻起来和尝起来都像臭鸡蛋”。
Turokk Dow is one of about 87,000 young children who are diagnosed with lead poisoning in the US each year, more than three decades after the neurotoxin was banned as an ingredient in paint, gasoline and water pipes. Today, lead lingers in houses and apartments, yards and water lines, and wherever states and communities ramp up testing, it becomes clear that the nation’s lead problem is worse than we realized, experts say.
托洛克·陶是美国每年被诊断出铅中毒的约8.7万名儿童之一。30多年前，这种神经毒素被禁止作为油漆、汽油和水管中的一种成分。如今，铅残留在房屋、公寓、庭院和水管中，无论各州和社区在哪里加强检测，专家表示，很明显，美国的铅问题比我们意识到的更严重。
A study published in JAMA Pediatrics this fall suggested that more than half of all US children have detectable levels of lead in their blood – and that elevated blood lead levels were closely associated with race, poverty and living in older housing. Black children are particularly at risk. The nation’s programs to detect lead before it poisons children and to identify those who have been exposed are astoundingly slipshod.
今年秋季发表在《美国医学会杂志：儿科学》上的一项研究表明，超过一半的美国儿童血液中检测到铅，而血铅水平升高与种族、贫困和居住在旧住房中密切相关。黑人儿童尤其危险。国家在铅毒害儿童之前检测铅含量以及确定那些已经接触过铅的人的计划马虎得令人震惊。
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