Global Lead Network: Alliance Releases Key Documents in French and Arabic Summer 2002
Media
Arabic Documents Now Available!
Expedited Completion of Leaded Gasoline Phase-Out Would Protect Millions Worldwide, Plan Concludes
The Alliance To End Childhood Lead Poisoning’s International Action Plan for Preventing Lead Poisoning sets the framework and agenda for worldwide elimination of this completely preventable disease. The Alliance’s Myths and Realities of Phasing Out Leaded Gasoline examines and refutes the myths that persist even today as the major obstacle to expeditious completion of leaded gasoline phase-out worldwide. The Alliance announces that the French and Arabic translations of the International Action Plan and Myths and Realities are now available, joining the existing English, Russian, and Spanish versions.
Lead poisoning continues to be one of the world’s most pervasively debilitating diseases. Lead exposures can adversely affect everyone, but special populations such as children, pregnant women, and men and women of reproductive age are particularly vulnerable to lead’s harmful effects. Even at very low levels, lead poisoning in children can cause developmental disabilities, hyperactivity, impaired growth, hearing loss, blood diseases, behavior problems, reduced attention span, and decreased productivity. Effects on adults include high blood pressure, kidney disease, and impaired fertility.
The International Action Plan identifies the roles of all the players needed to make worldwide prevention work and sets forth the compelling reasons for, and the basic elements of, a prevention program. The Plan concludes that the lead poisoning problem can be solved through coordinated and integrated action at all levels: international, regional, national, and community – and with the active involvement of NGOs, community-based organizations, and the private sector.
The Plan defines the logical next steps for action, identifying the phase-out of leaded gasoline as the most immediate priority. While other sources of exposure tend to vary from community to community and region to region, leaded gasoline remains the most dispersive and widespread source of lead in the environment for those many countries that have not yet completely phased out its use. Actions taken (or not taken) today to complete phase-out will affect generations. A World Bank study, for example, found that lead emissions from vehicles in developing countries could either increase five times by the year 2030 or fall to very low levels by 2010, depending on policy choices made today. The health of millions of people – especially children – will be affected by those policy choices.
Increasingly, international experts recognize the need for a plan to eradicate the devastating environmental health problems presented by lead poisoning. “Since we know both the sources of lead poisoning and how practicibly to control them, the world community must act now to live up to its prior commitments to phase-out and prevention,” said K.W. James Rochow, Director of the Alliance’s International Programs.
This Plan appropriately stresses the phase-out of leaded gasoline and other source control measures to prevent lead poisoning as international priorities for sustainable development. Lead is one of the most obvious candidates for an optimism-engendering environmental success story to follow up the Rio Conference. The international community must take advantage of this opportunity to demonstrate effective cooperation in dealing with this basic global environmental health issue as a precedent and springboard for tackling other sustainable development issues.
This Plan is being distributed to policymakers at the international, national, and local levels, as well as to advocates, experts, and the private sector. The steps that need to be taken are now clear – what is needed is the political will to eliminate this debilitating disease once and for all.
Consistent with the priority-based approach delineated in our Plan, the Alliance’s international program has given priority attention to expediting phase-out of the most dispersive source of lead worldwide – leaded gasoline. A major obstacle to leaded gasoline phase-out is the persistence of several myths and misconceptions. The Alliance’s Myths and Realities of Phasing Out Leaded Gasoline is used by advocates in many countries and every region to counter these specious but pervasive arguments that continue to impede expedited worldwide phase-out.
