Why would anyone even THINK about testing their sink or tub for lead! ...you don't drink from the sink.

Is she sure that it's the tub and the sink? Could it be the pipes that bring water to the house, depositing lead on the sink and tub?

If I were she, I'd get my water tested, pronto.

I don't think lead leaching from the porcelain in a sink or a tub would harm anyone. The problem with lead is ingesting it and to some degree inhaling it in the form of vapor - e.g. from paint burning and perhaps from breathing the dust.

Simple contact with lead is not likely to be harmful so I think bathing the child in a plastic tub would be overkill. I would be asking, though, if the lead is coming from other places (like lead dust from moving window parts). It is relatively simple to test blood for lead. We live in a very old (and constantly under reno) house and whenever we have blood drawn for other purposes we always piggyback a lead test. So far (nearly 20 years) we're fine. I do make an effort to reduce lead problems (good masking, cleaning up afterward and personal masks during work) generated from renovation, but I don't make myself crazy. Of course we have no kids to worry about.

Shoot, the plastic wash tub probably leaches chemicals.

HTH,

Molly

I wonder if the tub/sink had been painted with house paint at some point in time....people do some pretty stupid things in the name of saving money and making stuff look good. Perhaps that is where the lead is coming from.
My first thought too would have been the old pipes. In a case like that I'd start with the simple and continue onward till I got some decent answers.

The lead is from the original finish. The tub can be refinished to encapsulate the lead.

I read a story about a guy who got very ill from lead poisoning after he used an old bathtub to make wine.

I just got off the phone with my uncle Paul, who retired from the Eljer Foundry in Salem,Ohio. Before retiring his job for 39 years was mixing and grinding all the components to make the powder coat enamel used on Eljer cast iron fixtures. He informed me that this is totally nonsense because there is absolutely no lead in the finish of a cast iron fixture.

Actually I have read and been told that many old fixtures do indeed contain lead. However, maybe the ones that your uncle made didn't, or maybe it is just a contaminate from the cast iron or finish and isn't an actual component. Anyways, I have heard of this and I dont' think I would worry about it at all. I am sure the amounts are super low and most of us grew up taking baths in cast iron tubs and are fine. That is all there was for a long time!

As for the wine and lead poisoning, I totally believe that! I know that you are not supposed to let wine sit in leaded crystal glasses for too long (like store the wine in a crystal decanter) because the acid in the wine draws out the lead.

And yes, you really need to ingest it or inhale it. I think that the minimal amount that could be in a bathtub of water, and then the amount that you may actually ingest is SO small. I think there are much more important things to worry about.

Also, I thought everyone washed their baby in a small plastic tub anyways? A real tub is far to large. Most people I know just set the plastic tub in the kitchen sink and wash their baby there.
It is so much easier on the back.

Personally I think this entire notion of how hazardous lead is has gotten out of hand. The modern doomsday profits would have us believe if we sleep by an open window with lead paint on the sill that we will be brain dead in 6 months.

I am 59 years old and I am thinking back to my childhood. I was born in 1947 and plastics were still in there infancy in those days. Even into the mid to late 50's our toys were made of wood (generally painted with lead paint), tin, potmetal and lead. One of my alltime favorite toys was an electric hotplate with a ladle to melt lead and a set of 8 molds to cast toy lead soldiers about 5" high. In those days we could run to the local hardware store and buy plumbers 1lb."Pig Lead" ingots for $.08/lb. (The same lead used to make the oakum & lead joints in sewer pipes.) When times were hard and my cousins and I didn't have any money we would run down to the grocery store on the corner. When people would go inside to buy groceries we would steal the lead wheel weights off their tire rims. Every boy in the neighborhood knew we had the molds and melting pot so it was not uncommon for 6 or 8 boys to congregate at our house and melt upwards of 10 lbs of lead in a day and repeat this 2 or 3 times a week. It must also be noted that when you poured the mold there was always a small piece of waste lead attached to the head of the soldier from the top of the mold that had to be cut off. Understanding that 7-10year old boys were not permitted to carry a knife and having no fancy metal shears the solution was obvious to us, we simply bit the piece of lead off and spit the excess piece of lead back in the melting pile. By the end of a days production all of us boys would have a light grey film of lead on our hands. At 12 years old my cousin and I acquired a mold to cast fishing weights and we had a fair summer business supplying fishing weights to men and boys alike by the local fishing hole only by now our volume had expanded to 10 to 20lbs of lead per day.

When playing with lead got boring we would go behind the local HVAC shop and pull the old thermostats out of their trash bin. As soon as we got them home we would break them open to reveal the little glass vial mercury switch, which we broke open with a hammer and slide the mercury across a piece of newspaper into a puddle where we could then lift it an put the liquid mercury in a mason jar, of course in those days no one called it mercury, we called it "Quick silver" because you could dip a penny in the mercury then polish it between your thumb and finger to a high luster like real silver.

Now while many of you may be appalled at that type of play I would like to make it plain that this was typical conduct of boys in those days. Are we all brain dead today? Not on your life. In fact, I recently saw a graph of scholatic achievement in the USA from 1900 to date. As one might expect the graph was very low from 1900 until the late 1930's where it began a slow rise through the war years (39-45) then it began a very sharp upturn. In fact the highest scholastic achievements in U.S. History occured between 1964 and 1966 then it took an instant spiral down and today the average is only slightly higher than it was in 1935.

I graduated high school in 1965 and in 2005 at our 40th high school graduation anniversary they conducted a pole of our classmates. Out of the 306 students who graduated in our class not one had suffered any long term ill effects attributed to lead. Not bad for a generation that grew up with lead paint, lead toys, lead water pipes, lead solder on our copper pipes, extremely high lead content in the gasoline and oh yes, occassionally we even had real lead pencils in school, but we hated those because you had to lick the lead to make it write better.

Another interesting fact that was discovered at our anniversary. Not one member of our entire class could even remember anyone having asthma in those days, but then when we grew up their were no home computers or video games. We were compelled to go out in the fresh air to play.

Ha! I loved your little story. My husband used to play with a jar of mercury himself!
You are right, people are WAY more paranoid than before. Most lead poisoning is because of lead paint that is failing and it is easy to eat by mistake because you get the dust on your hands and then you don't wash your hands before sticking them in your mouth. there are a few cases where children have eaten a lead object and died, however that is rare.
As far as asthma, Not sure on that one. I tend to always think it is because of smoking and pollution but just as many people smoked and pollution was bad back then also. I actually don't know anyone with asthma anymore. One of my childhood friends had it, however it wasn't very bad at all. I never saw him use an inhaler.

I have a book on lead (around here somewhere, too many books) which discusses the ways certain brass faucets can leach lead -- depends on which process produced the faucet, and whether water sits. Maybe this is related. As vjrnts says, it may be more to do with piping.

lazypup, I used to do the same things.
I also had the casting toy.
I do agree that the media has made people too paranoid. I also think
that common sense in handling materials is lacking these days.

I agree that common sense is in short supply these days. The forum I read tends to be totally anti-everything, which makes me crazy sometimes. And let's not even bring up the subject of mold....

I have found an interesting thing happening. Since I'm one of the politcally incorrect who still smokes, I hide myself off on my deck or backyard. When I walk over to get my kids from school, there are cars lined up with motors running and you can't even breathe walking by there. Many of these parents only live within a few blocks and the kids could easily walk. A few of us have started asking the parents to turn off their vehicles so that the air would be better. I had one dad tell me he didn't care that kids couldn't breathe. (He later apologized to the principal, stating that he just got the word he was being deployed to Iraq. I hope his coping skills under pressure get better.) If I lit up a smoke out there, I have no doubt I would be crucified on the spot, by these same parents who don't have the sense to turn off their cars is 10 degree weather.

People make me tired.

Gloria

You might be less tired if you gave up smoking.