The more I learned, the more I saw how wrongheaded the public health approach to lead was. It was ass backward. When we test a child for lead, we are testing the child’s environment. Children become the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, as we use their bodies, their lives, as instruments to test the world around them. If they test high, that means there’s lead in their environment. This is useful to know, but for the child, it’s already too late.
