Health

Once Kathleen Cooper knew what to look for, she started to see it everywhere — chunky, metallic grey jewellery that fits young girls’ necks and budgets. It’s trendy, attractive and inexpensive — a seemingly perfect present. Except the Lindsay, Ont., mom wasn’t buying it as a gift. As a senior researcher with the Canadian Environmental Law Association, Cooper knew that these innocuous-looking trinkets could contain dangerous levels of lead, a metal that can affect the brain and cause a whole range of learning and behaviour problems. The danger for children, says Cooper, lies not in wearing the jewellery but in putting it in their mouths — sucking on a pendant or decorative zipper pull, biting down on a ring to make it fit better, holding a barrette between their teeth while they fix their ponytails. She has even seen babes in arms mouthing the sweet-tasting lead necklaces.

Cooper bought five necklaces for ten dollars and sent them to an independent lab for testing. The results were shocking. While Health Canada advises that lead in jewellery shouldn’t exceed 90 parts per million, these pieces had 70,000 to 130,000 parts per million. And this was after Health Canada had issued public advisories about the jewellery and sent warning letters to retailers, importers and manufacturers.

“I’ve found lead jewellery all over my house,” says Cooper, who has just prepared a detailed report on metals and children’s health for the Canadian Institute of Child Health, with funding from Environment Canada. “Earrings, hair clips, key chains, belt buckles, toe rings — it’s everywhere.” And although Health Canada says there is no safe level of exposure when lead is ingested, it’s still legal to sell lead jewellery in this country.

We’ve known for a long time that certain heavy metals and metalloids are toxic. Lead, mercury and arsenic are among the worst, but they’re still all around us. We regulated lead out of gasoline in 1990, but it’s a cheap and abundant metal and it keeps resurfacing. There were the lead-filled crayons from China in 1994, the plastic mini-blinds from Asia and Mexico in 1996, and the multicoloured sidewalk chalk from China containing high levels of lead in 2003, all of which were voluntarily removed from the market by manufacturers. But we still have lead-core wicks in cheap scented candles, which, when lit, emit harmful vapours. We still have unacceptable levels of lead used as a stabilizer in a few children’s toys made of soft vinyl PVC, such as the Floating Bath Toy 3+1 — 5,000 of which were sold in western Canada last year before the retailers, JYSK Linen ’n Furniture, learned there was a problem and immediately took them off the shelves. And houses built before 1976 almost certainly contain lead-based paint.

Originally published in Today's Parent, March 2004