Paint + Lead = Danger Article

Imagine a house. This house has floor boards that grew mildewed due to the leak in the roof. This house has outlets without protectors on them making it to easy to electrocute yourself.  The cords to lights and electronics snake along the floor near puddles of water from the leaks in the roof. The only thing that remains beautiful about this house is the walls. Painted a soft baby blue and still looking new after being there for years. In this house that is filled with dangers the most hazardous thing is the beautiful blue wall. Why? You may ask. Well the answer is the paint. It may not seem to be of a big concern, but the blue paint that is so beautiful contains lead.  Now you may be thinking that having lead in paint isn’t a threat because it is used in the yellow lines in the street, or heavy machinery, but just because we can’t see the danger of having paint that contains lead in it, doesn’t mean that it isn’t just as harmful as having unprotected outlets in a house.  So why is lead paint so dangerous?

On December 11, 2012 the Baltimore Press came out saying that a local store had to stop selling a certain type of necklaces, earrings, and ring. The reason for this was because the Baltimore City Health Department said that the small ring necklaces and earrings because they contained lead levels above the 100 parts per million on a scale of 900 to 2,400 that was legally allowed.  Lead is a metal whose tarnish layer can be made up of carbonates and hydrox carbonates. Lead contains the oxidation state +2 in this stage lead is pretty basic. Lead also contains oxidation +4 which makes the lead more acidic. Lead has a number of oxides in it which make up the different forms that lead can come in.  Lead is a navy metal like mercury making it toxic when taken from the earth.  Lead is a compound and an element. Lead has an ionic bond. Metals and non-metals put together make up an ionic bond. Although paint containing lead can cause real danger to our human bodies, it makes toys, houses, and machinery look good.  Having lead in paint makes the paint bright, durable, flexible, and it is a very inexpensive product.   Different colors of paint contain a different type of lead chromates. White lead mixed with yellow and a little dark orange can enhance the yellow in paint, or give the paint an orange hue.  Lead paint has pigments have two common forms. The first form is white lead which is a lead carbonate and the other form is red lead which is a form of lead oxide. Lead pigments in paint are very small making it easy to spread across a bigger surface.   When in its elemental form lead is a bluish white lustrous metal. But when found in paint it is in an ionic form and its properties dramatically change.  The isotopes in lead are the ending product of each of the three series of radioactive elements that naturally occur. 

To this day about 24 million houses in the United States that were made before the year 1978 still have paint that contains lead in it. This fact means that having young kids and adults live in these houses is very unsafe.  Lead dust from the paint on the inside or the outside of a home can cause brain and nervous system damage. It can also cause behavior and learning problem, hyperactivity, slowed growth hearing problems, and headaches.  It isn’t easy to tell regular paint from paint that contains lead though, and that’s what makes it even more hazardous. When a person ingests lead, the lead takes away the zinc that we have in our bodies that helps the oxygen flow in our blood. Zinc keeps out high amounts of copper that our body can absorb and causes growth in our bodies. If zinc is taken out of our blood stream then our bodies become unprotected. Zinc protects the immune system and other important organs. When lead gets into our bodies it takes away the zinc and can ruin the immune system and nervous system.   All of the aspects that make lead paint seem so easy and cheap to use, should not compare to the fact the using lead in paint can harm a person for the rest of their lives. Dr. Oxiris Barbot who is a commissioner of health stated to the Baltimore Times that “we should take out toys that have lead paint in them because the cost of lead poisoning can last a life time. Even though we can’t see lead making it hard for us to know if it exists in our homes, there are ways to test your homes for lead paint.  A good website to look at for more information on how to test for lead paint in our bodies and homes is the EPA website.