Bought a 1920s home with lead a paint, had it professionally tested. Some rooms have high exposure 11-12 with XRF (obviously dangerous) while some areas have 0.2-0.5 positive levels but they say are safe even areas marked 0.9 +- 0.2. My wife thinks lead in the paint is still lead in the house and wants it all removed. Idk how to explain why the lower levels shouldn’t matter vs when the higher level are so toxic. While we don’t have kids now, she wants to get pregnant in about 6 months, so the lead exposure is weighing heavily on her thoughts and concerns right now.
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Lead is lead!!! Your wife is right, some.
The reason we set lead levels somewhere and call it safe is because you have to work thru government and lobbies to set a standard. While there is some science behind those levels, usually there is more political lobbing and compromise.
Ideally 0 is best, however, very hard to reasonably achieve without a lot of work and money. So they set a level which is achievable , that an average person body can process, without much long term effects. This is generally based on an adult male in good health. Women, children, pregnant women, immune compromised, all require different levels since their body is different.
This does not directly answer your question but I feel it’s important to bring up. If you live in a house with lead paint, please consider the possibility that there may also be lead pipes servicing the house, either within the house, or leading from the street to the house. You can do a water lead test, and you can also check with your municipal water department.
Danger or safety with poisons is a continuum, not a specific number. Poisons in small enough quantities are harmless, and sometimes necessary, while at high enough levels poisons are outright damaging and dangerous. In between is a spectrum going from “not dangerous at all”, “could cause enough damage to matter about one time in a million”, “could cause minor damage sometimes”, all the way to, “DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! DANGER!”.
To simplify this, governmental regulating agencies try to draw a line below which the danger is effectively non-existent. How well they do this is a matter of huge debate. In some cases, they set this number too high, in others, they set this number too low.
And then everybody argues as to which it is in the case of any particular poison.
In this case, here is what I can tell you:
If she has already decided, let your wife have this. Period. This isn’t about who is right or wrong. It is about respecting her concerns about your children. She may be wrong, or she may be right, but it doesn’t matter.
Respect her concerns. Let her have this.
What matters is the time of exposure and intensity.
Think of it like getting a sunburn. If the sun is behind the clouds (low intensity) you need to spend a long time outside to get a sunburn. If the sun is direct, even 30 minutes can give a sunburn.
People determined that with regular usage (for example spending 16-ish hours a day) you won’t get exposed to enough led to cause health issues as long as the levels are below the safe limit. The exposure above that limit is higher than your body’s ability to deal with the substance which will lead to the disruption of chemical processes in your body.
There is no 100% safe level. The effects lessen with lower exposure. If you can afford to remove the lead then I’d do it. The safety level is a compromise between safety and cost.
You will not get all of the lead out of your home. There will always be lead in your water, food, dirt, and so on. This lead accumulates in your body, so even smallish levels of exposure over time build up to larger amounts inside of you.
So, yes, any lead exposure is not good for you, but at very low levels it’s just insignificantly small amounts of bad for you, and it becomes impractical very fast to avoid *any exposure at all*.
I’m not familiar enough with residential lead testing to know what units you’re using here, but exposure depends a lot on where the lead is. Flaking paint that someone inhales or eats is a huge hazard compared to stable paint covered by a layer of leadless paint.
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