Mateusz Karwowski and colleagues, with US Geological Survey geochemists, report a 9-month-old infant born in the United States whose venous blood lead was 13 to 18 mcg/dL against a reference level below 5 mcg/dL. The source was a non-commercial diaper powder from Malaysia. Four weeks after use stopped, venous blood lead was 8 mcg/dL. This page replaces an earlier abstract-only record with the full article. The powder is not a commercial baby powder.
Key numbers
Bulk analysis of unsieved splits found lead at 62 to 64 weight percent (620,000 to 639,500 ppm), primarily lead oxide (Table 4). The same analyses report antimony 1005 ppm, arsenic 55 ppm, bismuth 110 ppm, and thallium 31 ppm. The abstract rounds antimony to 1000 ppm. Arsenic is an elemental total. The paper does not speciate it.
| Fluid | Pb | Sb | As (species not stated) | Bi | Tl |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simulated gastric | 39% | 62% | 50% | 88% | 12% |
| Simulated lung | 0.03% | 9.9% | 2% | 0.09% | 3.6% |
| Simulated urine | 0.01% | 1.6% | 2.6% | 0.06% | 0.1% |
Gastric in vitro bioaccessibility for lead is printed as 239,000 mg/kg. The authors then calculate 105,000 mg of bioavailable lead per kg of powder and state that 1 mg of powder would deliver over 10 micrograms of lead. Those two figures are the authors’ calculation from the gastric result, not a second measurement. Mercury in the IVBA leachates was below 0.005 nanograms leached per kg solid.
Methods (brief)
USGS dissolved the powder in 20% nitric acid for bulk chemistry and ran a 2-hour in vitro bioaccessibility extraction, filtered at 0.45 micrometres. Simulated gastric fluid was a glycine system at pH 1.50. Tables 1 to 4 hold the fluid recipes and the results. The infant was seen in the United States. The powder was imported from Malaysia.
Evidence fitness
The article documents one extreme folk remedy and one infant blood-lead course. It supports that description and the bioaccessibility percentages above. It does not describe commercial talcum powder, and it does not separate inorganic arsenic from total arsenic.
Limitations
Single case. The filename supplied with this copy carries a DOI string that is not the DOI printed on the article. Antimony in the abstract (1000 ppm) is 5 ppm lower than the body figure used here (1005 ppm). The running text gives the lung-fluid percentages in the table above. The lung-fluid column of the results table also prints 2.2 and 3.7, and those two figures are not aligned to a metal in this copy, so they are not substituted for the running-text percentages.
Related evidence
Update history
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