Cadmium and Lead down Regulates T- and B- Lymphocyte Blastogenesis in Poultry

Cadmium and lead are potential heavy metal environmental pollutants. Cadmium is used in metal coating, paints, enamels, plastics, stabilizers of PVC, nickel-cadmium batteries, solders, low melting alloys, production of semiconductor and photovoltaic devices (Peterson and Allowy, 1979). Lead comes from printing industry plastics plaster, paint and batteries (Haley, 1968). Most of the investigations carried out on heavy metals induced immunomodulation have been done in vivo (Agarwal and Chauhan, 1997; Chauhan and Agarwal, 1998, 1999; Singh et al, 2000; Kumar et al., 1998, 1999). Paucity of work has been observed regarding in vitro exposure of heavy metals in very minute concentration on cultured cells for short duration of time. Therefore, the present study was planned to investigate the in vitro treatment of cadmium chloride and lead acetate on cultured avian lymphocytes.