OCR Text |
Show Official results show Prospector lead levels equal national average by Christopher Smart Official results from a survey conducted to test contamination from Prospector Square tailings released today by the Utah State Department of Health reveal that average blood-lead levels in 38 Prospector children are equal to the national average. Dr. Dennis Perrotta, coordinator of the Epidemiological Studies program for the State Health Department, said the average blood-lead level in Prospector Square children was 10 micrograms of lead for every 100 c.c. of blood exactly the national average. The National Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Ga. sets the level at which action should be taken to remove a lead source at 30 micrograms, Perrotta said. The lowest level found in the 38 children studied was 5 micrograms while the highest was 16, Perrotta said. No instances of abnornally high lead contamination were found, he said. While the results from the Prospector Pros-pector children tested were deemed average, findings from blood samples taken from nine children outside the Prospector Square area were even lower, Perrotta said. The average of the children tested who reside outside of Prospector Square is seven micrograms, he said. The difference, however, is not "statis'ically significant," signifi-cant," Perrotta maintained Health officials did not expect to find any abnormally high blood-lead levels at this time, Perrotta said, because the tailings on which Prospector Square is built have been covered by snow all winter. Blood samples will be taken again in September to determine if contact with the dust from the tailings is causing lead contamination in the children, Perrotta said. "Low results in September would lead me to generally conclude that lead exposure of any health significance is not related to living and playing in Prospector Square," he said. During the next week, the Division of Environmental Health will be collecting dust samples from several homes in Prospector, according to Perrotta. "We would like to compare blood-lead levels to dust samples and playing and eating habits," he said. The Health Department will be able to "draw conclusions" from the comparisons, Perrotta said. In February, Feb-ruary, Prospector Square parents were interviewed to determine their children's playing and eating habits. The mine tailings under Propsector Square first gained attention as a possible environmental and health problem in November of 1983 following a soil analysis by the Utah State Gf (logical Survey. |