In 1572 an extensive epidemic of disease characterized by severe abdominal colic, later identified as lead poisoning, occurred in France in the province of Poitou. Citois named the disease colica Pictonum, that is the colic of the Pictones, the ancient Celtic tribe who inhabited the area. Thereafter the term was used generically for lead poisoning, otherwise plumbism or saturnism. The origin of...

lead-paint in their products, though public health officials, notably in Boston and Baltimore, continued to identify cases in which lead-paint was implicated throughout the 1930s. The problem then largely disappeared from public view until the late 1940s and 1950s when hundreds of children started to appear in urban hospitals with acute plumbism. The trouble, it turned out, was lead-paint flaki...

Background:Lead toxicity continues to remain a concerning health problem for developing nations like Pakistan. Due to the lack of studies, we aim to highlight the clinical spectrum of lead poisoning in patients presenting to an urban-based tertiary care hospital in Pakistan. Method:This is a retrospective review of patients admitted form January 2011 to December 2014 using a structured question...

Acute lead (Pb) toxicity in mice, produced by a single i.v. injection of Pb acetate, was associated with transient erythroid hypoplasia and impaired utilization of RBC “Fe for heme synthesis. The mechanism of this Pb-induced erythroid hypoplasia was further investigated in posthypoxic plethoric mice. When Pb and erythropoietin (EP) were administered simultaneously, the resultant erythroid respo...

Childhood lead poisoning has been increasingly recognised in the USA where large-scale screening programmes detect some 40 000 cases of undue lead absorption a year. This contrasts with data from the UK where about 100 cases are recognised each year. The situation in other countries is largely unknown, although small surveys have revealed cases from a wide variety of sources. These apparent dis...

A pathologic increase in the amount of porphyrin excreted in the urine by patients with lead poisoning was first reported by Garrod (1) in 1892. Since then it has been generally assumed that this porphyrinuria is related in some way to the destruction of hemoglobin. Until recently there has been no means of testing the validity of this belief. Lately, however, the advance in knowledge concernin...

Knowledge of lead's capacity to disrupt the prooxidant/antioxidant balance within mammalian tissues suggests that definitive therapy for chronic lead poisoning should encompass both chelating and antioxidant actions. The dithiol meso-2,3-Dimercaptosuccinic Acid (DMSA) is the first orally administered metal chelating agent to receive U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for the treat...

Beginning in the 1890s, physicians in Queensland began reporting cases of lead poisoning in children. Lead poisoning up until that time-and for a long time after-was primarily an occupational disease, and the appearance of plumbism in children was therefore unusual, to say the least. As John Thearle has pointed out, the specific local events that brought Queensland physicians to interest themse...

Blood lead levels in some pre-schoolchildren living near a lead works and particularly in some children with fathers employed at the lead works showed evidence of increased exposure. Forty-seven of them took part three years later in a follow-up study of their developmental and behavioural functions. The children were aged between 4 and 5 1/2 years and were closely matched for age, sex, social ...