Mt Isa in Queensland is currently experiencing 'lead-alert'. Children are being exposed to excessive lead levels. Having previously lived the lead contamination story with small children, I know the heartache and frustration it causes.
Lead's incompatibility with human physiology was first observed in 200BC. Children are most affected. Absorption by developing brains and nervous systems can lead to hyperactivity, lack of concentration and loss of IQ.
The effects are subtle, and it's this nerve-racking subtlety that causes nightmares for families. Do we move away? Do we stay? Often enough, one parent wants to go and the other sees the problem in less dramatic terms, so it strains parental relationships.
There's usually dissembling when the spotlight lands on a lead mining town. Mt Isa is no exception. Since 2003, Swiss based Xstrata has owned the mines in question. According to an article in The Australian (December 2006) 290 tonnes of lead were released into the air in Mt Isa in 2004-2005. Queensland's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said politics had prevented air quality monitoring at Mt Isa's two smelters.
On 20 March 2007 ABC News quoted Xstrata's Ed Turley: 'There's already extensive natural sources of heavy metals in Mount Isa due to the levels of natural mineralisation.'
And Mt Isa Mayor, Ron McCullough, said in the same report: 'I don't think it is a major problem.'
It wasn't a view shared by the EPA, and these laissez-faire reactions weren't good PR. The next day the company announced a public meeting when, according to ABC News, data was released showing soil lead samples from the area are up to 33 times above federal health guidelines.
Several public meetings followed and, alongside them, guidelines for parents on protecting their children — among these, Queensland Health's advice on the importance of washing children's faces and hands. Such advice is all well and good as long as it is not sold as the solution.
At a public meeting I attended 20 years ago similar ideas came up, including frenzied cleaning, scrubbing vegetables in salt, ensuring children never played outside and getting them to wash vigorously before and after inside play. The more obsessive you were, the better.
It's clever. It turns a public health issue into an internalised housekeeping one. It's impossible to maintain the cleaning schedule and paid work. And the endless housecleaning doesn't involve developing a relationship with a child, but one with an industrial strength vacuum cleaner