For six months this year, Xena Buckle quarantined her family into the one room in her council house in south London that she knew would not poison her six-year-old son.
Tests had just revealed that the toxic metal lead was present in Rhegon’s blood at almost twice the UK’s medical intervention level of 5 microgrammes per decilitre. Flaking lead paint in the property was to blame.
The UK is home to some of the oldest housing in the world, and many homes still have lead paint, which as it flakes and rubs off walls, windows and door frames creates a poisonous dust that can be harmful to humans if ingested.
Before it was banned in 1992, lead paint in the UK may have contained up to 50 per cent lead by weight, “which is potentially capable of causing lead poisoning in a small child if they eat just a single flake”, according to government guidance published in October.
The well-established health risks associated with exposure to the metal — which has a harmful impact on almost every organ in the human body — have led to a ban on its use in petrol, domestic paint and pipes in the UK.
But experts said a lack of routine testing meant hundreds of thousands of children would be silently suffering from the effects of lead poisoning.
“This is a timebomb and it’s not going to go away,” said Alan Emond, emeritus professor of child health at Bristol Medical School. “By not facing up to it now, we are going to expose another generation to lead.”
When staff from the UK Health Security Agency visited Xena’s house to screen for lead in January, they found levels of 16,400 milligrammes per kilogramme of lead in the bedroom walls.
The government’s public health body acknowledges that the presence of lead at around 1,000 mg/kg can cause issues if a child ingests enough.
Wandsworth borough council, which has conducted remedial works at the house, said it took its “responsibilities for the safety of residents seriously”, moved “quickly if [lead paint] is found” and had rehoused Buckle and her family.
“It’s been a nightmare,” said Buckle, one of nearly a dozen parents who told the Financial Times that they believe lead paint in their homes has damaged their own, or their children’s, health.
That a GP tested Rhegon’s lead levels was unusual, experts said, because the UK does not routinely test lead levels in children.
Instead, there is a passive surveillance system under which the UKHSA is alerted to children with a blood lead concentration above 5 microgrammes per decilitre.
Detection in children relied on results of tests ordered by doctors if they thought there was a high chance of lead poisoning, said Jane Entwistle, professor of environmental geochemistry at Northumbria University, “as such most cases of elevated blood lead are missed with no obvious symptoms”.
“If you don’t test, you don’t know,” she added.
Despite international studies estimating that hundreds of thousands of children in the country will have lead poisoning, UKHSA was notified of just 226 cases in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available.
A report published in 2020 by Unicef, the UN children’s agency, using figures from peer countries with a similar income level, estimated about 213,000 children in the UK could be living with lead levels above 5 microgrammes per decilitre.
In 2018, the UK government decided against conducting nationwide screening of lead levels in children because “the number of children affected in the UK is currently not known” and the test was “not reliable enough”. The Department for Health and Social Care declined to comment.
In the US, children covered by Medicaid, the public health insurance programme, as well as those living in specific states are screened for lead exposure at the age of one and two. In 2021, the government’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program marked 30 years of work.
Howard Hu, professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California, said it was “odd that a developed nation like the UK has no systematic way of looking at lead exposure in likely vulnerable populations . . . We can’t let scientifically advanced nations like the UK fall behind.”
Bruce Lanphear, a professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, who has researched lead exposure for decades, said it was “absolutely bonkers”. “UK officials may not want to open a big can of worms, but ignoring the problem won’t make it go away,” he added.
One mother who asked to remain anonymous said she believed her own health problems and those of her son were the result of exposure to lead during her pregnancy and his early years, as she carried out extensive renovation work on the family’s recently purchased 1930s home.
Within weeks of moving in, she began sanding down layers of lead paint in the woodwork and the walls.
In September last year, private tests showed her own lead levels were 4 microgrammes per decilitre, four months after she gave birth. After being dismissed by her GP, tests carried out by a hospital consultant showed her son had levels of 1.45 microgrammes per decilitre.
“The hospital consultant agrees we cannot say we were not previously exposed and poisoned,” she said, describing the experience of obtaining lead tests with her local GP as a battle.
In 2004, lead was identified as a Class II risk that could result in “severe harm outcomes” by the UK’s Housing Health and Safety Rating System, a government assessment method for residential properties.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said “landlords must ensure their homes are fit for habitation and free from dangerous health and safety hazards, including dangerously high levels of lead”.
“Where this does occur, councils can take enforcement action and landlords must comply with this,” it added. Asked how landlords and sellers were meant to know if lead was present in a property, government officials pointed to guidance that was published in October this year. They also pointed to a now-withdrawn public information leaflet.
MHCLG was unable to provide data on compliance and enforcement action taken against landlords, but said it would “always encourage” prospective home buyers “to consider an independent survey before exchanging”.
Tim Pye, a co-founder of the Lead Exposure and Poisoning Prevention (LEAPP) Alliance, a group of academics and parents, said the public should be better informed of the risks because “if you don’t know, you won’t report it”.
He called for the renters reform bill, which is now going through parliament, to be amended to have lead hazards and risk assessments included in home buyers’ surveys.
Buckle, who movee back into her home last, said the experience of discovering lead paint had been devastating for her family.
“I was going to start decorating and thank God I didn’t,” she said. “If I had sanded the walls I would have contaminated the whole house.”
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