This study assesses the accuracy and comprehensiveness of online public health education materials from the three Australian cities with active lead mines and or smelters: Broken Hill, Mount Isa and Port Pirie. Qualitative content analysis of online Australian material with comparison to international best practice where possible. All materials provided incomplete information about the health effects of lead and pathways of exposure compared to best practice materials. Inconsistent strategies to reduce exposure to lead were identified among the Australian cities, and some evidence-based best practices were not included. The materials normalised environmental lead and neglected to identify that there is no safe level of lead, or that primary prevention is the best strategy for protecting children’s health. Health education materials need to clearly state health risks from lead across developmental stages and for sensitive populations, integrate a primary prevention perspective, and provide comprehensive evidence-based recommendations for reducing lead exposure in and around the home. Families who rely on information provided by these online public education materials are likely to be inadequately informed about the importance of protecting their children from exposure to lead and strategies for doing so.

Mount Isa, Queensland, is one of three Australian cities with significant lead emissions due to nonferrous mining and smelting. Unlike the two other cities with lead mines or smelters, Mount Isa currently has no system of annual, systematic, community-wide blood lead level testing; and testing rates among Indigenous children are low. In previous screenings, this group of children has been shown to have higher average blood lead levels than non-Indigenous children. The first aim of this study was to assess whether parents and children would participate in less invasive, rapid point-of-care capillary testing. The second aim was to measure blood lead levels among a range of children that roughly reflected the percentage of the Indigenous/non-Indigenous population. This pilot study is based on a convenience sample of children between the ages of 12 and 83 months who were recruited to participate by staff at a Children and Family Centre. Over three half-days, 30 children were tested using capillary blood samples and the LeadCare II Point-of-Care testing system. Rapid point-of-care capillary testing was well tolerated by the children. Of 30 children tested, 40% (n = 12) had blood lead levels ≥5 µg/dL and 10% had levels ≥10 µg/dL. The highest blood lead level measured was 17.3 µg/dL. The percentage of children with blood lead levels ≥5 µg/dL was higher among Indigenous children compared to non-Indigenous (64.2% compared to 18.8%) as was the geometric mean level (6.5 (95% CI, 4.7, 9.2) versus 2.4 (95% CI, 1.8, 3.1)), a statistically significant difference. Though based on a small convenience sample, this study identified 12 children (40%) of the sample with blood lead levels ≥5 µg/dL. Due to historical and ongoing heavy metal emissions from mining and smelting in Mount Isa, we recommend a multi-component program of universal blood lead level testing, culturally appropriate follow-up and intervention for children who are identified with blood lead levels ≥5 µg/dL. We further recommend focused outreach and assistance to the Indigenous community, and further control of emissions and remediation of existing environmental lead contamination in children’s play and residential areas.

Childhood lead exposure and poisoning near primary lead smelters continues in developed and developing countries. In the United States, the problem of lead poisoning in children caused by smelter emissions was first documented in the early 1970s. In 1978, Environmental Protection Agency set National Ambient Air Quality Standards for lead. Attainment of this lead standard in areas near operating lead smelters took twenty to thirty years. Childhood lead exposure and poisoning continued to occur after the lead National Ambient Air Quality Standards were set and before compliance was achieved. This article analyzes and discusses the factors that led to the eventual achievement of the 1978 lead National Ambient Air Quality Standards near primary smelters and the reduction of children’s blood lead levels in surrounding communities. Factors such as federal and state regulation, monitoring of emissions, public health activities such as blood lead surveillance and health education, relocation of children, environmental group and community advocacy, and litigation all played a role.

This article examines the history of risk assessments of the organophosphate pesticide chlorpyrifos at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), especially after a ban on household uses in 2000. Federal funding enabled more noncorporate and place-based scientific investigations of this pesticide’s harms, including child-cohort epidemiology of populations impacted through environmental injustices. This article argues, first, that their findings challenged the thin knowledge base, mostly from corporate-sponsored toxicology, that originally justified chlorpyrifos’s continued use. Second, for decades, outside a court-induced interval in 2015–2016, EPA’s risk assessments favored “de-placed” toxicological modes and standards of knowledge—forged in the controlled environment of experimental laboratories—while marginalizing science gathered from the actual places and people EPA is supposed to protect. Third, agency officials stuck with a quantifiable, laboratory- and modeling-centered calculus for assessing health risks in part because a united front of corporate and corporate-consultant scientists harped on the uncertainties of newer findings. The article concludes that the agency needs to rethink its risk assessment practices and dependence, as well as more effectively account for financial conflicts of interest in evaluations of policy-relevant science. ( Am J Public Health. 2025;115(7):1074–1084. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2025.308073 )

How damaging was the Trump administration to environmental justice (EJ) efforts and policy? Since federal EJ oversight at the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is governed by executive order, rather than statute, approaches to it have varied by presidential administration. In this paper, we draw on interviews with current and recently retired EPA employees along with staffing and budget data, to examine how EJ has historically been supported and enacted within the agency, with a focus on identifying impacts of the Trump administration on EPA’s EJ work. We find that while leadership support for EJ and emphasis across the agency have changed across presidential administrations, the EJ program has always held a marginal position in terms of allocation of resources and emphasis in regulatory decision-making. Starting from this position of long-term marginalization, EPA’s EJ program was further marginalized by the Trump administration. Though EPA employees expressed divided opinions as to how consequential the Trump administration’s actions were on enacting EJ internally, many thought that the administration’s emphasis on deregulation had significant health consequences in EJ communities. We argue that the impacts of the Trump administration, like those of future administrations, must be assessed within a historical context.