Lead Poisoning

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Dec 4, 1879

THE manufacturers of tinted goods of all sorts, in their efforts to compete with one another in cheapness of price without diminishing their profits, have adopted the most reprehensible practice of sophisticating the tin coating of their goods with lead. By this means the cost is greatly lessened, both by the use of a less expensive metal and by increased facility of manufacture. This is done, notwithstanding the fact well known to manufacturers as well as to others, that vessels for use in cookery or to contain food, if made of lead or having it in their composition, are eminently dangerous not only to health but to life. Milk pans, stew pans, dippers, water-pails, tea and coffee pots, in fact, every culinary utensil made of tin, is an active source of danger to life.

Lead-tin fruit cans, on account of the acidity of the contents, by means of which the lead is more readily dissolved, are perhaps the most dangerous of all. Tin roofing, when made of this sort of tin, is also a source of danger.

Not a few cases have occurred in which it was clear that persons had been poisoned through this means, by the use of milk from tin pans, fruit put up in tin cans, water caught from a tin roof, etc. In one case a student suffered most severely from eating cranberry sauce which his landlady had cooked in a tin saucepan. He would doubtless have suffered much more had he not detected the danger by the metallic taste which made the metal apparent.

The danger from water passing through lead pipes is now too well known to need pointing out, but people need constantly to be reminded of it. Lead pipes should never be used for drinking water. Zinc pipe is better, but is not free from danger. Iron pipe is perfectly safe, and should be used in spite of the little inconvenience occasioned by rusting. Galvanized iron pipe possesses all the bad qualities of zinc, but is much safer than lead.

Lead has also been discovered in the lining of certain kinds of cheap glazed ware. Such articles cannot be used without injury, since the lead will be dissolved by liquids which may be contained in them. If the liquid possesses any degree of acidity, the danger is increased in a great degree.—Health Annual for 1880.