Prior to being banned in 1978, lead paint was common for painting houses. Approximately 24 million housing units in the United States have deteriorated leaded paint, and young children inhale lead-contaminated house dust.

Lead poisoning has long been recognized as a serious threat to children. The CDC estimates that more than 400,000 children in the United States under the age of five have elevated levels of lead in their blood, which can cause many serious ailments including brain damage and central nervous system disorders.⁵ As authorized by Congress, the CDC has impaneled a group of experts since the 1970s to advise the government on how to best protect children from lead poisoning—one of some two dozen advisory committees within this agency alone.⁶ Thanks in part to this committee’s recommendations, the incidence of elevated lead levels in children has been reduced substantially over the past several decades.⁷

In the summer of 2002, the CDC Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention was preparing to consider whether to revise the federal standard for lead poisoning set most recently in 1991. Initially, in 1975, the CDC had officially defined “lead poisoning” as the presence of more than 30 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. Over time, as emerging scientific evidence showed a health threat from even lower levels of lead exposure, the CDC altered its standard. The lead poisoning threshold was lowered in 1985 to 25 micrograms per deciliter and, in 1991, was further reduced to 10 micrograms, where it stands today.⁸

According to numerous sources familiar with the committee’s work, the advisory group at this time was likely to rule in favor of a more stringent federal standard for lead poisoning, reflecting the latest research linking ever-smaller amounts of lead exposure to developmental problems in children.⁹

Just a few weeks before the committee’s scheduled meeting, at which the question of toughening the standard further would be discussed, the Bush administration intervened. Tommy Thompson, secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), took the unusual step¹⁰ of rejecting nominees selected by the staff scientists of a federal agency under his own jurisdiction. According to Dr. Susan Cummins, who chaired the CDC’s lead advisory committee from 1995 to 2000, this was the first time an HHS secretary had ever rejected nominations by the committee or CDC staff.¹¹ In place of the respected researchers the CDC staff had recommended,¹² Thompson’s office appointed five individuals who were all distinguished by the likelihood that they would oppose tightening the federal lead poisoning standard.¹³

Furthermore, a review by congressional staff members soon uncovered the fact that at least two of the new appointees had financial ties to the lead industry.¹⁴ One of them, Dr. William Banner, an Oklahoma-based toxicologist and medical director of the Oklahoma Poison Control Center, had previously testified in court on behalf of the SherwinWilliams paint company in a lead poisoning case. In his capacity as an expert witness for this manufacturer, Banner declared that, in his view, studies had never adequately demonstrated a link between lead exposure and cognitive problems in children at any level below 70 micrograms per deciliter.¹⁵ In this respect, Banner holds what several leading medical specialists on lead consider a “fringe” view in his field (far from even the normal extremities of mainstream expert scientific discourse). As one medical researcher explains it, Banner’s position either ignores or willfully misreads some four decades’ worth of accumulating data on lead exposure in children.¹⁶

Researchers may well reasonably debate whether the government should tighten its standard for lead poisoning. The public needs and deserves such an informed debate. In this case, however, the Bush administration effectively denied the public an informed policy recommendation by tampering with the integrity of the advisory panel nominating process.

To make room for his appointees, Secretary Thompson’s office dismissed Dr. Michael Weitzman, a highly respected lead expert who had served for four years on the panel. Weitzman is chief of pediatrics at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and executive director of the American Academy of Pediatrics Center for Child Health Research. Unlike Banner, Weitzman has conducted research on lead exposure and published widely on the subject in peer-reviewed journals. Weitzman states that shortly before he learned of his rejection by Secretary Thompson, CDC staff told him they planned to nominate him to chair the advisory committee.¹⁷

The dismissal of Weitzman and the rejection of other CDC-recommended candidates came via direct intervention from HHS Secretary Thompson’s office. Department spokesperson William Pierce explains that some 258 advisory panels fall under the purview of HHS and, under the Bush administration, the department “closely and actively oversees” the appointment of some 450 scientists to these panels annually. HHS, Pierce continues, does not consider itself bound by any particular agency nominations for committee positions; rather, Secretary Thompson’s staff “takes into consideration recommendations from people inside and outside of the federal government.”¹⁸

“We’ve seen a consistent pattern of putting people in who will ensure that the administration hears what it wants to hear,” says Dr. David Michaels, a research professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at George Washington University’s School of Public Health and former assistant secretary for environment, safety and health at the DOE during the Clinton administration. “That doesn’t help science, and it doesn’t help the country.”¹⁹

As Michaels points out, political appointees may be hired to further a given political agenda, but scientific advisory committees have a distinctly different role: namely to “advise agencies and the public about what is the best science.” When the process becomes politicized, he notes, “the committee’s role will be hampered, the nation’s best scientists will shun involvement, the government’s credibility will suffer, and the public will lose vital input to the government on behalf of its safety and health.”²⁰

In the case of the CDC Advisory Committee on Lead Poisoning Prevention, the stakes for public health are high: millions of the nation’s children, and their parents, depend on lead poisoning policies based on the best available scientific evidence and technical information.