By Carl Weiser
Enquirer Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - Cincinnati lead poisoning expert Bruce Lanphear was flattered when he was nominated for a seat on a prestigious government board that oversees child lead-poisoning prevention.

But Dr. Lanphear never made it to the board.

Instead, the Bush administration rejected his nomination and those of other lead poisoning experts, and then, according to critics, replaced them with people more friendly to companies that use or once used lead in manufacturing.

"It makes you wonder, if the Bush administration was seeking advice on whether the sun revolved around the earth or vice versa, would it take Galileo off the committee and replace him with the Inquisition," said Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who has publicized the Bush administration actions.

Now Dr. Lanphear, a University of Cincinnati pediatrics professor and director of the Cincinnati Children's Environmental Health Center, finds himself at the center of a larger controversy over whether the Bush administration is tilting its scientific panels toward a pro-business or conservative ideology.

"This is clearly not about my nomination or approval," said Dr. Lanphear, a Hyde Park father of three girls. "The real issue here is we are allowing scientific advisory committees to be contaminated by people who have clear bias, clear financial conflicts that will not allow them to make unbiased scientific decisions."

The Bush administration calls such charges ridiculous. It says its nominees are all respected scientists, just as interested in children's health as Dr. Lanphear, though with opinions that may not match his or other like-minded children's health advocates.

Tommy Thompson, secretary of health and human services who approves board members, wants boards with "broad representation of thinking," said his spokesman, Bill Pierce.

"If you have everyone who thinks the same thing, whose research was all the same, you will only get one opinion," he said. "This has nothing to do with (the lead industry). This has to do with wanting to hear all the arguments, hear all the thinking on the subjects."

Panel tightened standards

The Department of Health and Human Services alone has 258 advisory committees. Members aren't salaried, although travel costs are usually covered. Some boards meet frequently, others almost never. Some have vast jurisdictions - one looks at injury prevention - while others focus on specific diseases.

The Centers for Disease Control's Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention had a record for important work, advising the agency on how to treat lead poisoning and what level of lead in the blood might be worrisome.

In 1991 the panel lowered that level from 25 micrograms per deciliter of blood to 10. Dr. Lanphear and others would like to see it lowered even more - a move that would expand the pool of children considered to suffer from lead poisoning.

"Unless we lower it, we're not going to take action because there's no perceived threat to society," Dr. Lanphear said. "All the evidence coming out indicates there's no discernible threshold; the effects below 10 are not subtle."

Cincinnati is a hotbed of lead poisoning research, thanks mostly to the University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.

In the past two years, Cincinnati researchers have published papers in scientific journals suggesting that lead poisoning may lead to juvenile delinquency, and another that a common treatment is ineffective.

Another published scientific paper chronicled a Cincinnati girl who had lead levels 14 times the level now considered safe. She was suffering from lead poisoning so severe that she was running into walls and falling down.

At such high levels, lead poisoning can cause high fevers, vomiting and even death. A 2-year-old New Hampshire girl died from lead poisoning in 2000 after eating peeling lead paint in her apartment.

But nationally and in Cincinnati, problems that stem from eating lead paint or breathing in lead dust tend to show up later in school: Children with lead poisoning have trouble reading, drawing, doing math and following instructions.

Lead poisoning is much rarer, nationally and in Cincinnati, since the federal government banned lead-based paint in 1978 and began phasing out leaded gas in 1975.

Fewer than 1 million children have high levels of lead in their body today, down from at least 3 million in 1978.

About one in 15 Cincinnati children have high levels of lead, according to the Ohio Department of Health. That's higher than rates in Columbus or Dayton but far below Cleveland or East Cleveland, where one in four children suffer from high lead levels.

Lead is the top environmental health threat to children in the United States, particularly infants and toddlers living in deteriorating housing, like that in Over-the-Rhine and other central city neighborhoods, said Kim Dietrich, another Cincinnati lead poisoning specialist who says he personally has examined hundreds of local children with high lead levels.

Lead industry struggling

No trade association represents the lead industry anymore. The Lead Industries Association has gone bankrupt, its Web site maintained as a historic relic by a Milwaukee lead parts manufacturer.

The National Paint and Coatings Association, which represents many of the paint companies fending off lawsuits, said it played no role in who got on the panel. Steve Sides, vice president of environmental health for the group, said no one disputes that lead is dangerous and that there needs to be more lead screening, especially in inner-city neighborhoods.

But lowering the "action level," as it's called, to less than 10 micrograms per deciliter wouldn't serve any purpose, he said. It simply would make almost everyone, especially people older than 25, appear as if they had lead poisoning.

Most people have a level of 2 or 3 micrograms per deciliter of lead in their blood, Mr. Sides said.

"It becomes a very weird area to be operating in. We would all be affected by lead," he said. "It's a ubiquitous environmental contaminant. It's in the earth's crust. We're all exposed to it. ... If you're sitting at a computer, that screen has a lot of lead in it, too. That lead is keeping you from having a dose of radiation you don't want. It's essential to have a lead industry. We just didn't need it in paint."

Companies that made lead paint have fended off more than 40 lawsuits since 1989. Rhode Island sued the industry, but a mistrial was declared last month.

The new chairman, whom the Bush administration nominated, is Carla Campbell, who has done research suggesting lead poisoning may be irreversible, making prevention even more important. She runs the lead-poisoning program at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Dr. Lanphear was originally nominated in October 2000 - during the Clinton administration. Not until March of this year did he receive a second phone call telling him he had been rejected.

"This is all extraordinarily ordinary," Mr. Pierce said. "We get new advisers all the time. The secretary is not afraid of a diversity of opinion. I don't know whether some people don't want to hear all there is to hear."

Part of larger issue

The dispute over the lead poisoning panel is one of several cases in which Democrats, environmentalists and consumer groups have accused the Bush administration of stocking scientific boards with ideologues or corporate apologists, rather than good scientists.

The Bush administration has tapped a Lexington, Ky., gynecologist, W. David Hager, for the Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. Dr. Hager fought the Food and Drug Administration's approval of RU-486, commonly called the abortion pill. He wrote a book with his wife that advocates using the Bible to help treat pre-menstrual syndrome.

The Bush administration also picked Mildred Jefferson, a founder and former president of the National Right to Life Committee, to serve on a new board about clinical research.

And former Oklahoma Rep. Tom Coburn, an obstetrician, was picked for the administration's Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS.

"HHS is being stacked with scores of appointees who are more concerned with ideology and theology than they are with sound science," said Susanne Martinez, vice president of public policy for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The group supports abortion rights. "These people will be charged with advancing laws and regulations that promote and protect the health and well being of everyone."

But Steven J. Milloy, an adjunct scholar at Washington's libertarian Cato Institute and founder of the junkscience.com Web page, said the Bush administration isn't doing anything new or surprising.

The Clinton administration, when it came in, stacked the scientific advisory committees with environmentalists, consumer advocates and folks with a bias against corporations, he said. Now the Bush administration is undoing that.

The idea that these advisory committees could be filled with unbiased scientists is nonsense.

"Science is so politicized in this country," he said. "There's just no thing as an honest scientific debate. Everybody has an ax to grind."