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Children’s Exposure to Lead from Tap Water in Child Care Centers and Estimation of Blood Lead Levels

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Abstract

The continuous exposure of young children to low levels of lead is a public health concern since it is associated with adverse neurodevelopmental effects. Drinking water is a potentially important source of lead exposure for children. In the present study, lead concentrations from a public dataset that contains 27,734 regulatory water samples collected in child care centers across Ontario, Canada were analyzed to determine the water lead concentration distributions for each public health unit. The seasonal changes of the water lead concentrations were also assessed. Children’s blood lead levels (BLLs) were estimated using the Integrated Exposure Uptake Biokinetic model for children aged 1–5 years old. In this analysis, the median lead concentrations of the flushed samples were used to estimate the average exposure, and the 90th percentile of the standing samples was used to estimate the worst-case scenario. The results indicated that the geometric means of the modeled BLLs varied from 1.5 to 1.6 (GSD = 1.6) µg/dL for the average (median) exposure scenario which is significantly lower than the 5 µg/dL level of concern for children. However, the geometric means of the modeled BLLs varied from 3.9 to 4.9 (GSD = 1.6) µg/dL for the worst-case (90th percentile) scenario which indicate relatively elevated blood lead levels for children.

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Source: https://www.ontario.ca/data/drinking-water-quality-and-enforcement)

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source: https://www.ontario.ca/data/drinking-water-quality-and-enforcement)

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source: https://www.ontario.ca/data/drinking-water-quality-and-enforcement)

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Water and Energy Center at United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) [Grant Number 12R026-AUA-NWEC -7- 2020].

Funding

This work was supported by the National Water Center, United Arab Emirates University [Grant Number 12R026-AUA-NWEC -7- 2020].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. QuantWave Technologies Inc., 89 King St N Unit 1, Waterloo, ON, N2J 2X3, Canada

    Fei Chen

  2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada

    Chen Tao

  3. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UAE University, P.O. Box 15551, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates

    Mohamed A. Hamouda

  4. National Water and Energy Center, UAE University, P.O. Box 15551, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates

    Mohamed A. Hamouda

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  1. Fei Chen
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  2. Chen Tao
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  3. Mohamed A. Hamouda
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Contributions

FC: investigation, methodology, supervision. CT: formal analysis, visualization, writing—original draft preparation. MAH: conceptualization, funding acquisition, project administration, writing—reviewing and editing.

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Correspondence to Mohamed A. Hamouda.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 2, 3, and 4.

Table 2 Summary of drinking water samples collected from child care centers in each public health units
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Table 3 Inputs to IEUBK simulations for children 1–5 years old (
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Table 4 Outputs to IEUBK simulations for children 1–5 years old (GSD = 1.6 µg/dL)
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Chen, F., Tao, C. & Hamouda, M.A. Children’s Exposure to Lead from Tap Water in Child Care Centers and Estimation of Blood Lead Levels. Expo Health 15, 333–346 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12403-022-00493-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12403-022-00493-1

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