Evaluation of studies of the relationship between blood lead and air lead

An evaluation of the major studies of the effects of airborne lead on blood lead levels of male and female adult and child populations is presented. Analysis of these studies shows that the blood lead-air lead slope for adults is approximately 1.0 for both men and women. This implies that an exposure to an additional 1 microgram Pb/m3 of air can result in an increase of approximately 1 microgram Pb/100 ml of blood. The precision of the slope for adults is rarely better than +/- 0.5 to +/- 0.7 and can be as large as +/- 1.0. A large portion of this uncertainty in the calculated slope is due to blood lead measurement error. The slope of the blood lead-air lead response for children ranges from 0.7 to 1.4 and is approximately the same as that for adults. The accuracy of this number is less clear for children than adults due to the small data base. Many of the studies of children have been on populations living in the vicinity of smelters. It is questioned whether these data are representative of the air lead exposure of children living in urban and suburban communities.