Herbert Needleman

My favorite way to capture students’ attention about lead poisoning is to tell them about Dr. Herbert Needleman and his use of children’s baby teeth. In the late 1960's, Needleman recruited school teachers in Chelsea and Somerville, MA to collect their young students’ deciduous teeth when they fell out. It was a non-invasive way----no needlesticks, no bone biopsies---to get data on lead burden in children. Needleman’s team analyzed the teeth for lead which helped them establish a population distribution of tooth lead levels. (It did not exist up to that time.)  In 1972, he published the…

The pediatrician suspected that something wasn't quite right with the youngster.  He'd met the teen as part of his North Philadelphia community health center's psychiatry outreach program.  "He was a very nice kid...[but] he had trouble with words, with propositions and ideas," the pediatrician remembered.  It made him wonder, "how many of these kids who are coming to the clinic are in fact missed cases of lead poisoning?" That's the story recalled by Herbert Needleman, MD and shared in 2005 with historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz about the pediatrician's initial inquiries into the…