Neurophysiologist

Well, these scientific explorations, were they initiated in addition to your basic research or--$$Oh, yes.$$--or did your basic research come out of what you found when you did your explorations? Let's take Ecuador, for example.$$Well, the two are kind of connected but disconnected. I mean I enjoy laboratory work. I mean being at the wet bench or working in the lab is something I enjoy. I still have a lab. I've had one now all my career to do research with. But you also want to get out in the field and do things too. And I enjoy getting out in the field, exploring places, looking at some of the medical problems, seeing how we can help, bringing in teams with expertise to do solid medical, clinical work. I've been doing that now for, you know, close to twenty years. And it turns out that my work in Ecuador started as a result of going to a village where all the children had black teeth. And the moment you see this, you know from your biomedical training, from my degree in medical science, I know that that's a sign of severe lead poisoning in children, not just lead poisoning, but severe lead poisoning. This led me to try to find out if we could look at the deciduous teeth, to see the content of the lead. More than that, you can take blood samples, and I brought in medical teams and worked closely with Ecuadorian authorities who were individuals from the medical school, also the dean of the local medical school, to go out to see these children who had never received medical care in many cases, to get blood samples to bring back to analyze here in America, Children's Hospital and other centers, for free, to help these children. And we found that these children had some of the highest blood lead levels ever recorded. The CDC [Center for Disease Control and Prevention, near Atlanta, Georgia] says if you have ten micrograms per deciliter of lead in your blood, you're in the toxic range. Some recent studies in 'New England Journal of Medicine' suggests that even less than ten micrograms per deciliter of lead in the blood of children would cause neurocognitive impairment. We found children way over one hundred micrograms per deciliter which, you know, are not even included pretty much in the standard medical text book analysis. And we were able to--I raised money personally from--or at least medication in exchange from companies like Santa Fe (Santilebo) (ph.) who gave me twenty thousand dollars worth of chelation medication. And with a group of doctors from Children's Hospital in Sweden, we were able to figure out a way to get this medicine dispensed to reduce the lead poisoning in these children.$$What was the source of the lead in the systems of these young children?$$That's a very good question. It turns out that in these villages, and there were a number of them in Ecuador, but they also exists in Mexico and Peru, the women of child-bearing age in many of these villages have as their major task, digging lead out of old car batteries that we discard and taking that lead and mixing it with water, grinding it into a slurry and glazing ceramics, particularly, roof tiles. So some of these villages, such as the ones I worked in, in La Victoria and El Tahar down in Ecuador, they make many of the overlapping brick or ceramic tiles that you see on the Spanish homes. And they cover them with lead for two reasons, primarily, it makes this clay more durable. But secondly, it's cosmetically appealing. And so a small group of people--the upper-class members of society don't do this. It's left mostly to the poor. And they don't really educate the poor about the dangers of this. And many of them are indigenous Amerindians. And that touched me deeply when I saw this sort of stratified society with discrimination. I don't like discrimination anywhere that it occurs. And I can tell you that this was seen in many areas of South America. And so that's why I stayed there to help. So I've spent ten years on that project, going back and forth taking medicines. We've had educational sessions and the education of the community will help. It lowers the level of blood lead. We've tested before and afterwards.$$Now, is mercury also a problem in these populations?$$Mercury's an extensive problem there, mercury exposure, primarily because of the gold mines in South America. Mercury is used in gold mining to separate the gold particles from the alluvial sediment, from ore. And then the mercury is burned. And as a result of that, the villagers, particularly, the women with the babies on their backs, the indigenous women, will breathe the vapors and the babies will breathe the vapors as well. And they can get exposed through elemental mercury vapors which are quite dangerous, can damage the lungs, the brain and kidneys, but also a lot of this residual mercury will leech off into the local tributaries and waterways and settle on the bottom. And that mercury is broken down, we learned only recently, by microorganisms which are then eaten by higher organisms, and finally the fish and the larger fish, and then it sort of bio-magnifies up the chain. And humans eat it. And there again, you've got methyl mercury poisoning because it methylates as a result of its position in the biota and in the water there with the microorganisms eating it. And you get methyl mercury poisoning from eating the exposed fish or other animals, the chickens that have been exposed or otherwise. And that's a very dangerous proposition. So we found high exposure levels, unbelievably high in some of the children in Ecuador, for example, up in the gold mines.