Biden administration push to replace lead pipes a chance to save lives

If we were to award a prize for the person who, intentionally or unintentionally, caused the most human suffering in American history, one nominee would certainly have to be Robert Kehoe, a medical doctor who worked hand-in-hand with the leaded fuel industry, and for a half century assured lawmakers and the public that a little lead in the system was harmless.

It isn’t of course, and today we know that lead stunts IQ, leads to criminal violence, damages the brain and nervous system and is particularly devastating to children and women of child-bearing age.

Which is why the Biden Administration is taking the long-overdue step of accelerating replacement of the nation’s lead pipes through which flows the drinking water of millions of Amerticans.

In the mid-20th century, Big Tobacco could at least say with some degree of accuracy that no one really knew the long-term effects of smoking. Such was not the case with lead. The Romans figured it out — too late, some believe, to save their empire. (Seeking to cure illnesses caused by lead, Roman doctors prescribed mercury; win some, lose some.)

Lead acetate, or “sugar lead,” had the useful property of sweeting up cheap wines that were well on their way to becoming vinegar. As lead poisoning claimed more lives, including Pope Clement II and possibly Beethoven, European governments grew increasingly alarmed. Perhaps the first widespread public health regulation was the prohibition of lead acetate in alcoholic beverages.

But then as now, public health warnings were ignored if they proved an inconvenience or an obstacle to sales. Many European socialites died young in the late 18th century: leaded white pigment was an additive in lucrative industries of cosmetics and powdered wigs.

And Americans have always been flexible in their scientific beliefs when profits are to be had. By 1925, deadly lead paint had been banned by most of the developed world — except for the United States, which continued poisoning its children until lead paint was outlawed in 1970.

Lead survived all those years because in 1921 General Motors needed it. Unable to wrest market share from the unglamorous but workmanlike Fords, GM went for speed, developing a high-compression engine that was powerful all right, but prone to performance-sapping knocking, the product of combustion misfires. Researchers tried every additive they could think of, from aluminum chloride to melted butter without success — until finally they discovered a compound that made the big engines purr like a kitten: tetraethyl lead, the secret sauce in what became known as ethyl gasoline (the word “lead” was conspicuously avoided).

But the fuel that was so good for the engines was not good for the men who produced it.

“Shortly after production began, workers in all three plants began to go crazy and die, often in straightjackets,” wrote physician and historian Herbert L. Needleman. “Somewhere between 13 and 15 known deaths occurred, and over 300 men became psychotic. Workers called the product ‘looney gas’ and the place where it was fabricated ‘The House of Butterflies.’ This last sobriquet was earned by the sight of psychotic workers trying to brush phantom insects off of their arms.”

This was, as they say, a bad look.

GM’s director of research Charles F. Kettering needed a credentialed stooge who would reassure the public and Congress that there was nothing to see here. He found one in Kehoe, a young toxicologist at the University of Cincinnati, who dismissed the risks of lead exposure and was richly rewarded with positions of Medical Director of the Ethyl Corp. and as a corporate officer at GM.

Kehoe has his defenders, who suggest his beliefs were honestly come by, not the product of corporate paychecks. Possibly. But either way, his was the final poisonous word on lead for half a century. He concluded that lead was natural and therefore “normal,” and most took his word for it because no one else had studied this new product.

He further stacked the deck by creating ground rules placing the burden of proof on those who feared health risks — knowing full well that such definitive studies would take decades — and asserting that absent conclusive proof of harm, economic benefits should take precedence over public health fears.

Perhaps the greatest atrocity is that another fuel, ethanol, was effective at eliminating engine knock too, but GM rejected it because, ethanol being essentially the same thing as moonshine, it couldn’t be patented and profited from.

There was, of course, no more effective way to inject poisonous lead into the environment than through automotive exhaust, house paint and water pipes. We have dealt with paint and (mostly) leaded fuels.

Replacing millions of miles of water lines will be expensive — but less so than treating the illness, learning disabilities, violent crime and premature death that these old leaden relics will cause.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Ridding America of lead poisoning could finally reach zenith