The Invisible Threat Taking Away Our Brightest Minds | Drew McCartor | TED

All right. I'm here to deliver good news about lead poisoning. But first, a little bit of bad news. And that is that this issue that we treat as a problem of the past is just taking an almost unimaginable toll on humanity today. In fact, what you're looking at behind me are IQ points that lead is robbing from the youngest kids on Earth permanently and in real time. And by the end of the day today, that number is estimated to exceed 2 million IQ points lost on the day. And then tomorrow it'll be another 2 million. And then again, and again, every day until we solve it. And lead isn't just causing brain damage. It kills a shocking number of people through cardiovascular disease. Heart attacks and stroke. In fact, in 2023, the last year that we have estimates lead took more lives than all active wars all natural disasters, all road accidents and HIV and malaria combined. Just from lead. I run a nonprofit called Pure Earth and we prevent lead poisoning. And a couple years ago, we were cleaning up lead pollution in a village in Bangladesh that resulted when some men leased a plot of land to recycle the lead out of old car batteries. And they would take these lead plates out of the battery and melt them down in an open fire spreading toxic dust across the community. And that is where we met Saim. Now, you cannot spot a lead poisoned child. But Sayem's mom knew. And she told us that before the men arrived, Sayem was doing well in school and he could remember things. And then gradually, he began forgetting everything. I want to show you what Sayem told us. Sayem doesn't know what grade he's in. I have a daughter Sayem's age and if you have kids, you know how important their grade level is to their identity. You don't get to call your third grader a second grader without catching a little feedback about that. So what can lead be doing in the brains of kids to allow a child to forget what grade they're in? Well, Sayem's brain, like all kids brains, is like a new city under construction. And calcium actually plays a role like a city planner directing crews to build synaptic roads and bridges that allow for things like learning and memory and impulse control, all these tools we need. But when lead is in the body, it masquerades as calcium. And the brain will use the lead instead. But lead is a terrible city planner. — [snorts] — And it directs those crews to build dead-end streets and bridges to nowhere. And once lead's chaotic network is built, the damage is permanent. And Same isn't alone. Around the world, more than 1 billion kids and teenagers have a concentration of lead in their blood that exceeds the World Health Organization's threshold for intervening in a child's life. A billion. That's one in three. Now, imagine you're looking at your kids and you have to choose which one. Almost all of these kids live in low-income and middle-income countries where the average child has an exposure level high enough that they will lose an estimated four to five IQ points due to lead. And that is enough to shift the entire intelligence curve downward such that we cut in half the number of kids who have an IQ above 130. These are gifted kids. And we increase by half the number of kids who have an IQ below 70, who face

intellectual disability. Now, I suspect that we agree if you rob one child of their potential, that's a tragedy. But to do it to a billion kids, that changes the trajectory of humanity. Okay, that's all the bad news. Now, the good news, this thing is solvable. This is Yeah. — This is not one of those global problems that we're going to struggle to make progress on cuz the politics aren't aligned or it's too expensive or we need some magical new technology. This one is solvable today with the tools that we already have. And I know that because for 25 years, Pure Earth has been testing prevention strategies, and we've learned that when governments take three core steps, lead levels can drop dramatically. So, here's the model. First, run a nationally representative survey of kids exposure levels. That usually means testing the blood of a couple thousand kids to establish a baseline, to understand how many kids and where they are, but mostly, this motivates governments with their own data cuz the news is usually bad. Second, we got to find out where the lead's coming from. In the West, we talk a lot about old paint and pipes, and those are issues in other countries, but the exposure sources vary wildly from place to place, and can include things like food and spices, traditional cosmetics and medicines, things like ceramic glazes, cheap aluminum cookware, and industrial pollution like Same Faced. But the point is we need to identify the priority ones. And then thirdly, and most importantly, we have to regulate and remove lead from our economy and our environment. And this looks like tightening standards, improving enforcement capacities, and cleaning up old contaminated sites. So, that's the model. I don't want to pretend like it's easy. It's not easy, but it's also not rocket science. And it works. In 2018, the country of Georgia conducted a national survey with UNICEF and found that 41% of Georgian kids exceeded that WHO threshold. The government brought Pure Earth over, and together we identified contaminated spices as the major driver. People were putting lead-based pigments in the spices to make them those bright oranges and reds. The government tightened their regulations, improved their enforcement capacity, and today lead levels in the hardest-hit regions of Georgia are down by 75%. The government owns the agenda, and the next generation is well protected. — But Georgia isn't alone. We've helped the Philippines conduct their first large survey. We've helped Ghana identify their exposure sources. We've helped Mexico reduce the use of lead-based glazes, and there are dozens of other examples of countries and organizations making progress. Now, we cannot give back to Thaim what lead stole from him. But there are millions of young brains under construction right now. We have to get to them before lead does. And that's the plan. With support from the Audacious Project donor community, we are rolling out the model that I just described in over 20 countries that are home to 500 million lead-poisoned kids. And I'm confident that over the next 8 years, this program will improve the intellectual capacity, health, and longevity of not just that half a billion kids, but every generation coming up behind them. — So, you now know more about lead poisoning than almost anyone on Earth. And that fact remains our central challenge. So, tell people. Tell them how big it is. And tell them that we can solve it. Thank you. —