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Received: 03 August 2017
Accepted: 03 August 2017
Published: 19 September 2017
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Herbert L. Needleman, MD, pediatrician, child psychiatrist, and hero for children’s environmental health, died in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 18 July 2017.
[Image omitted - see PDF]Herbert L. Needleman, 1927–2017
Steve McCaw/Image Associates
Needleman was one of the world’s foremost researchers on lead poisoning. He conducted seminal studies that illuminated with great clarity the enduring impacts of lead on children’s health. He was a deeply moral man with a strong sense of social justice, a courageous and highly effective advocate who successfully translated his scientific findings into robust, evidence-based interventions that safeguarded the health of millions. He conducted much of this work in the face of powerful opposition.
Needleman’s scientific work began when he was a young pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He noted that children who had recovered from acute lead poisoning appeared frequently to have chronic residual neuropsychological impairment. He came to realize that lead poisoning was not an all-or-none phenomenon from which a child either died or recovered completely, as had previously been taught. Instead, he hypothesized that lower levels of exposure to lead that produce no clinically evident symptoms might nonetheless be associated with permanent neuropsychological deficits, albeit of lesser magnitude, a phenomenon now termed “subclinical toxicity.”
Through his subsequent studies, Needleman documented that the loss of intelligence, the shortening of attention span, and the disruption of behavior that results from subclinical lead poisoning is permanent, untreatable, and irreversible. He therefore argued that the only rational approach to treatment of lead poisoning is to prevent exposure to lead.
In his first major epidemiologic study, Needleman conducted a cross-sectional evaluation of two groups of asymptomatic elementary school children in Boston. Needleman...