Poisoned Pottery

Lead is lethal. Once used as a paint base, for example, it poisons hungry slum children who like to chew bits of old paint from their flaking tenement walls. Last year two such children died and an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 were affected in New York City alone. But lead poisoning is hardly confined to slums. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, a team of Canadian researchers has now analyzed an insidious source of the ailment: glazed earthenware pottery.

The search began when two young brothers, aged two and four, were admitted to a Montreal hospital with acute lead poisoning. The younger boy died three days later; his brother survived. In tracing the source of the poison, doctors learned that both boys had recently been drinking large quantities of apple juice from a handcrafted earthenware jug. Glazed with a compound containing a high lead content, the jug poisoned the apple juice at a prodigious rate. Within three hours, juice stored in the jug had a lead content of 157 parts per million. The maximum allowed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is only 7 ppm.

Used because of their low melting point, lead compounds give pottery the smooth glaze favored by professionals and amateurs alike. They also produce disastrous side effects. Lead glazes probably caused the chronic poisoning and sterility that contributed to the decline of 5th century Rome. More recently, a physician's own case of lead poisoning was traced to cola drunk nightly from a cup his son had made in a university ceramics class.

More cases seem likely unless Government agencies exercise tighter control over lead in pottery intended for culinary use. Spurred by their discovery, the Canadian research team conducted extensive tests on the commercial, hand-crafted and imported pottery available in their country. Of the 264 surfaces tested for lead release, more than half exceeded the FDA's allowable maximum, some by more than 1,000%.

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