An epidemiologic approach to community air lead exposure using personal air samplers

Accurate information on the relationship between blood lead and air lead is essential to any consideration of the possible effect of air lead on the body burden. Past studies of occupationally exposed workers have established that such a relationship exists at high levels of air lead exposure. No such information has been available for subjects exposed to the low air lead levels representative of present-day community exposure. Past studies in this area have suffered from inadequate information on actual lead exposure at the air lead levels of concern. Researchers have has to rely on air lead data obtained from stationary samp;ing stations. Because wide variations can exist betwween locations within a city such information could not be assumed to represent the exposure of any individual subject. At lbest they can be considered only approximations of actual exposures. The Naational Research Council recognized the deficiencies of past studies in their report "Airborne lead in perspective" and recommended that "more precise studies are needed of the relation between atmospheric lead in the urban environment and the concentration of lead in the blood, perphaps by the use of personal monitors". This paper describes the study which was undertaken to evaluate the effect of air lead exposure as measured with personal air sampling devices on indices of lead absorption such as blood lead, urine lead, DALA and ALAD activity...