Keywords
petrol
poisoning
paint
lead
How to Cite
Abstract
The role of clinical laboratories in lead exposure has traditionally focused on the diagnosis of poisonings that pose a risk to human health. However, the last decades of the twentieth century saw an increase in public awareness of lead exposure, which prompted the banning of both lead-containing paint and petrol. As a result, acute lead poisonings are increasingly rare in industrialized countries. However, this is always a latent danger that clinicians should be aware of. As an example of this we describe two cases that we recently diagnosed at our laboratory.
Even more worrying is confirming the harmful effects of lead on children, even at concentrations hitherto considered safe. This has renewed interest in the determination of this element in clinical laboratories in order to find and control all those pregnant women and children who might have blood lead levels above a suitable threshold value, which is currently set at 50 μg L-1 for both populations. If this situation becomes the norm, the role of clinical laboratories with respect to lead determination will undergo a major change. This possibility is discussed in this paper, together with a pilot program developed at our hospital for such purpose.
The articles published in this journal are subject to the following terms and conditions:
- The journal retains copyright of the articles published, and encourages and permits their reuse under the licence indicated at point 2.
- The articles are published in the online edition of the journal under licence Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). They can be copied, used, disseminated, transmitted, and publicly displayed, providing that the authorship, URL address and the Journal are cited, and that no commercial use is made of them.
- The authors agree with terms of licence use of the journal, with the self-archiving conditions and with the open access policy.
- In the event of reuse of the articles published, the existence and specifications of the terms of licence use must be mentioned, in addition to citing the authorship and original source of the their publication.