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#Post#: 19--------------------------------------------------
Firearms/lead poisoning
DIR By: allmanav
Date: May 11, 2017, 7:39 am
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Firearms safety is key for people who use weapons at work or for
recreational shooting. But one risk has been little
acknowledged: Lead dust exposure.
In a standard bullet, a solid lead core wrapped in a copper
jacket sits atop a stack of gunpowder and lead primer. When the
gun fires, the primer ignites, the gunpowder lights, and some of
the lead on the bullet boils. When the casing snaps out of the
ejection port, lead particles trail behind it. As the bullet
hurtles down the barrel of the gun, a shower of lead particles
follows.
If a gun range isn't ventilated well, lead dust collects on
shooters' clothing and hands and lingers in the air, where it
can be inhaled. The more people shoot, the greater the risk of
being exposed to dangerous amounts of lead. It becomes an
occupational hazard for weapons instructors, police and defense
personnel.
It can also put family members at risk. A 1-year-old boy in
Connecticut was found to have high blood lead levels at a
routine doctor's visit. There were no lead paint or pipes in the
child's home. The exposure was traced to his father's job as a
maintenance worker at an indoor shooting range; the father cared
for his son after work in lead-contaminated clothing, according
to a 2015 report from the state public health department.
In order to reduce risk, the Department of Defense has lowered
its blood lead standard to 20 micrograms of lead per deciliter
of blood, three times more restrictive than its previous
standard, which relied on Occupational Safety and Health
Administration guidelines. These OSHA guidelines apply to
workers inside the United States, including employees of private
firing ranges, but not to customers of those ranges.
The DoD's new blood lead policy, in effect as of April, comes
after a National Academy of Sciences report published in 2012
showing that defense personnel face significant health risks
from lead from firing ranges, defense department spokesperson
Lieutenant Colonel James Brindle told NPR. "DoD's subject matter
experts in toxicology and occupational medicine used the
Committee's report to propose the lower allowable blood lead
level." The study also showed that people should expect negative
health consequences at the blood lead standard set by OSHA.
The OSHA standards for blood lead and exposure to lead have long
been criticized as inadequate and dangerously outdated. "The
current [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] standard
hasn't been updated since the 1970s," says Dr. Elena Page, an
occupational and environmental hazards physician at the National
Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. "It's widely
acknowledged that the OSHA standard is not protective. They're
clearly aware of that, and there's been a lot of pressure to
change it." OSHA did not provide comments or interviews
requested for this story.
About 1 million law enforcement officers train on indoor ranges,
according to the CDC, and there are 16,000 to 18,000 private
indoor ranges in the U.S.
Currently, the OSHA standards for lead exposure decree that
employees must stop working if they have a blood lead level of
60 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, and workers can
return to the job if their blood lead level drops below 40 for
two consecutive tests. But adverse effects on cardiovascular
health, brain function and kidney function have been connected
to blood lead levels as low as 5. "There's no amount of lead in
your blood that's safe," Page says.
The issue of lead exposure and firearms is divisive, even the
question of whether higher lead levels are unsafe. "Well, that's
their opinion," says Larry Keane, the vice president and general
counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation. "We believe
there are efforts by others that want to diminish people's
participation in shooting sports or exercise their second
amendment rights. They put out or advocate positions that are
unsupported by the evidence."
The need for a stricter lead standard is obvious, says Adam
Finkel, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a
former OSHA official. "OSHA is really letting people down," he
says. "We're learning more about the neurologic effects of lead,
and for whatever reason this substance has the capability of
causing a whole spectrum of health effects at the OSHA standard
that people don't appreciate."
Many effects from lead can be subtle or nonspecific, says Mark
Laidlaw, an environmental health scientist at RMIT University in
Australia. "Memory and concentration problems, headache,
abdominal pain, mood disorders – they can be attributed to a
number of things unrelated to lead," he says. "You can have one
of these health effects, but the shooters might not realize
these are associated with their shooting. They just don't know
they're being lead poisoned."
At levels slightly higher than 5 micrograms of lead per
deciliter of blood, people may begin suffering spontaneous
abortions or kidney dysfunction, according to the CDC. As the
volume of lead in the body increases, the effects become more
severe. "At levels of 10 or less, there's definitely evidence of
increased incidence of tremor. Some are more cognitive effects,"
says Catherine Beauchum, an industrial hygienist at NIOSH and
author of a 2014 report that found that most people with
elevated blood levels were exposed from working at recreational
firing range. "With acute lead poisoning, you can get wrist
drop, nerve problems, abdominal pain. If it gets high enough,
you can get a coma and death."
Firing ranges can be particularly hazardous environments.
Defense department ranges, private recreational firing ranges
and law enforcement facilities have been found to be
contaminated with high levels of lead, according to
investigations by The Oregonian and Seattle Times in 2016 and
2014. Often, neglected or failing ventilation equipment was to
blame.
A review of lead exposure at shooting ranges that Laidlaw
published last month found that nearly all participants in the
36 studies had blood lead levels above the 5 microgram ceiling
recommended by the CDC; some had levels higher than 40. "You got
to understand, the more bullets you shoot, the higher your blood
lead level. The more visits you take to the range, then the
higher your blood lead level."
And when OSHA has inspected firing ranges in the last few
decades, the agency has commonly found lead contamination
violations. "It's about 30 years of sampling. They haven't done
very many, but just a quick look shows about 350 air samples,"
Finkel says.
About half of samples exceed the 50 microgram per cubic meter
air level standard for workplaces, Finkel says, and some gun
ranges had contamination levels]up to 24,100 micrograms per
cubic meter of air. "So, it's terribly, terribly common, and
[OSHA] finds overexposures even to their 40-year-old inadequate
standard."
The defense department's new blood lead limit of 20 does not go
far enough, Laidlaw says. He thinks a better standard would be a
maximum of 10 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. "It is
a step in the right direction, however the best way to deal with
the problem is to eliminate lead from bullets and primers," he
says. "I worry about the health of the young men and women in
the military who are exposed to lead regularly while using
firearms."
The Defense department has a long-term goal of reducing
employees' blood lead levels to below 10, Brindle says. "The DoD
policy requires mandatory removal of the worker from workplace
exposures when their blood lead level exceeds 20, and
effectively will achieve the long-term average blood lead level
to stay below 10," he writes to NPR in an email.
But some within the industry say it's not necessary to abandon
lead ammunition. "[Lead] is only a problem if [gun ranges] are
not designed maintained properly," says Bill Provencher, the
co-founder of Carey's Small Arms Range Ventilation in Tinley
Park, Ill. "Even if OSHA standards are somewhat risky, a
properly ventilated range has hardly detectible lead levels at
0.6 [micrograms per cubic meter of air.]"
The most important thing aside from range ventilation,
Provencher says, is to make sure that people are using safe
practices like carefully washing their hands and clothes after
shooting. "I would say [awareness] is going from not very good
to good," he says. "The people I've met with really high lead
levels, most of them did seriously silly things like working in
the environment while drinking coffee. Ranges can be an unsafe
place, but they can be perfectly safe places. There are people
out there who are just hard headed and do silly things."
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