The city of Newark, New Jersey, has distributed some 38,000 faucet filters to residents since October, prompted by concerns over excessive levels of lead in drinking water due to an aging infrastructure. Recent testing revealed those filters are failing, and city officials started handing out water bottles to affected residents this week.
Diane Calello, MD, executive and medical director of the New Jersey Poison Control Center, and professor of emergency medicine at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School in Newark, spoke with MedPage Today about Newark’s evolving drinking water crisis.
Following is a transcript of her remarks:
Newark, like a lot of other cities in the country, actually has an aging water infrastructure. There are lead pipes and those are called service lines, but there are also copper pipes throughout the city with lead solder, that can erode. There are a lot of things that can kind of contribute to lead making its way into drinking water. And that’s where we find ourselves in Newark where, first in the public school water testing, and then in the residential areas, they have found elevated lead levels over the allowable standard of 15 parts per billion.
The Poison Control Center has not really been involved with the city’s response, although we would happily help, going forward. But the city, I think, made the decision to distribute filters and now is distributing bottled water. Bottled water is a great quick fix because we know there’s no lead in bottled water. But, you know, it’s hard to sustain long-term.
Lead is primarily a neurotoxin and it can have effects on any patients who have excess exposure to lead, particularly in high doses. Not really what’s normally associated with drinking water, but particularly at high doses of lead, which is associated with residential peeling lead paint, people who work with firearms and munitions, shooting ranges, that kind of thing. Even gunshot wound victims who have retained bullets, sometimes those people get very high levels of lead.
What we see in adults is brain fog, fatigue, high blood pressure, sometimes organ damage, particularly focused around the kidneys. But in children, even at lower levels, we see problems with development. There’s evidence that suggests that IQ points are lost when a child is exposed to lead even at lower levels. And so the people that we have to focus on protecting, whenever you talk about fixing the water, are kids. Kids and pregnant women.
The elevations in blood lead levels associated with drinking water are real, but very small. A kid who’s got a high lead level that’s likely to cause a problem with their development is much, much, much more likely to have gotten it from peeling residential paint. And so when we talk about patients exposed to drinking-water lead, we’re not talking about people who are likely to need chelation, for example. They’re not likely to need hospitalization for drinking-water lead alone.
But it’s also our job to realize that those lower levels, which may not need hospitalization or chelation, could have a developmental consequence. And that’s why it’s got to get out of the water.
[There are] a lot of nuances: how does the lead get in? If you test a faucet at this time of day and then you test it again at another time of day, is it going to be the same? Does running the water help, and like we started off this conversation, there are a lot of things that can contribute to lead in water, and it could even be the faucet. So finding out where it’s coming from, and getting rid of it, is what I would like to see happen.
You know, the city of Newark will not be the last city to encounter this. The city of Flint, Michigan, was not the first. It’s a priority nationally to get lead out of drinking water. And that seems to be centered around a lot of the cities just because of the aging water infrastructure.
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