Five friends had excessive blood lead levels at the same time! After testing all the pots and pans at home, the reason turned out to be a folk remedy

Some time ago, a fan came to us and said that he was not feeling well. After going to the hospital for a checkup, he found that his blood lead level was seriously exceeded! Not only that, his four friends went to the hospital for a checkup and found that all five of them had excessive blood lead levels!

So the parent asked us to send the suspected objects - coated pots, purple clay teapots, glass kettles, tap water, cooking oil, and two cans of tea in the home to the laboratory for testing, but no problems were detected.

We followed the parent to his home, carefully checked his living environment, and found a batch of tea (these friends all love drinking tea) and sent it for testing, and there was still no problem.

This makes us all feel very strange. What exactly caused their blood lead levels to exceed the standard?

After half a month of investigation, the parent recalled that he and his friends had taken pills made by a local doctor when they traveled last year. When we sent the pills for testing, the results shocked us: the lead content of the pills was as high as 130,000 mg/kg! That is, there was 13% lead in the medicine - this is not lead added to the pills, but pills added to the lead!

It is conceivable that if this parent eats a few more, who knows what kind of harm it will cause to his body!

But this is not an isolated case. We found that there are many such cases, and the number of victims is far greater than we thought.

A few days ago, according to Kankan News, more than a thousand cases of lead poisoning occurred in infants and young children across the country. Some of these children vomited continuously, some had abdominal pain, and some had diarrhea. Many parents took their children to seek medical treatment everywhere, but could not find any results.

After careful questioning, the doctor found that many children had used some so-called "folk remedies".

After testing by a third-party testing agency, it was found that the lead content of these so-called "medicines for treating oral ulcers" was as high as 5%, and the lead content of "medicines for treating pharyngitis" was as high as 11%. The lead content of 1% detected in folk remedies is already very high! Not to mention 5% and 11%! As long as it is used for three to five days, it will cause serious lead poisoning!

These thousands of cases are only the number of cases received by the pediatric department of Shanghai Jiaotong University Xinhua Hospital every year. We don’t know how many cases of lead poisoning there are that have not been counted, in addition to the cases where parents traveled all the way to Shanghai.

We looked through the news and found that it is not difficult to find such cases in various places.

Not only children, but adults are not immune.

Every case is heart-wrenching.

The reason why there are so many cases of lead poisoning after using folk remedies is that lead itself has an anti-inflammatory effect. Many folk remedies contain lead, such as prickly heat powder, eczema medicine, burn medicine, kidney tonic medicine, etc. If you use them carelessly, you can easily get poisoned!

Lead poisoning is close to you. How easy is lead poisoning?

According to a survey conducted by Hou Deyi's research team from the School of Environment at Tsinghua University on 735,271 children aged 0 to 6 years old from 1987 to 2017, the average blood lead level of children was 182.9 µg/L from 1987 to 1991, and the average blood lead level of children was 42.4 µg/L from 2012 to 2017.

To put it simply, in the past 30 years, many children in our country have been harmed by lead to varying degrees!

How serious are the harms to them? The relevant information from WHO explains the impact of different blood lead levels on children and adults:

▲ Note: 10 ug/L = 1 ug/dL

As you can see, as long as there is lead in the blood, it will cause harm to the human body! And children's resistance is even lower, even a trace amount of blood lead content will damage the child's intelligence! So the less blood lead content, the better, it is best to have no!

According to a study of 160 children published in the Chinese Journal of Practical Pediatrics in 2000, for every 100 µg/L increase in children's blood lead, their IQ would drop by 6.67 points (the average person's IQ is around 100, and a drop of 6.67 points is equivalent to a one-fifteenth drop).

Some children have difficulty learning when they are young, which may not be because they are not smart or hardworking, but because blood lead blocks their path to success. However, the harm of lead to the human body is not limited to this, and some of its damage is irreversible.

▲ The WHO official website describes the hazards of lead

Thinking of those children aged 0 to 6 who had high blood lead levels between 1987 and 1991, many of them have grown up and may have embarked on a completely different life path because of high blood lead levels. When their peers were still healthy, they may have been at risk of high blood pressure early on, and these adverse effects will accompany them throughout their lives.

What we can do So, the best way is to eliminate the impact of lead on us from the source.

But the reality is that many ordinary people lack professional medical knowledge and cannot distinguish the quality of these folk remedies. This is especially true in some traditional places, where a large number of unqualified itinerant doctors are prevalent, deceiving others to buy so-called "secret remedies", causing people to suffer irreversible damage to their bodies and placing a heavy burden on families!

Of course, it is more important to prevent problems before they happen than to recover after the fact. Therefore, we have summarized several ways to prevent excessive lead content:

May our efforts make this world a little better.

References: [1] Yunhui Zhang, David O'Connor, Wendi Xu, Deyi Hou, Blood lead levels among Chinese children: The influence shifting of industry, traffic, and e-waste over three decades, Environment International, Volume 135, 2020, 105379, ISSN 0160-4120.

[2] Xiong Haijin, Lei Xiaoyan, Zhao Yifang, et al. Study on the correlation between blood lead level and IQ in children[J]. Chinese Journal of Practical Pediatrics, 2000, 15(12)
:731-732.DOI:10.3969/j.issn.1005-2224.2000.12.011.

[3]https://www.who.int/zh/news-room/qa-detail/chemical-safety-lead-poisoning
[4]https://www.who.int/teams/environment-climate-change-and-health/chemical-safety-and-health/health-impacts/chemicals/lead
[5]https://www.unicef.org/reports/toxic-truth-childrens-exposure-to-lead-pollution-2020