Is lead the killer it's made out to be?
By Bryce Martin

Galena is the name of my home town. Galena means lead. My home town had the largest lead smelter in the world, starting around a hundred years ago.

"Long-term exposure to lead dust poses a health risk, particularly to young children."

I've heard that.

A killer tornado blasted the old home front over the past weekend. In the region, typical summer dust devils traditionally blew dust off mountains of mining waste, known by locals as chat piles.

We breathed it.

Still do.

The most recent tornado destruction in the region, and perhaps deadliest of all, that fairly well put Picher, Okla., to waste for good, was making news in stories and headines nationwide and alarming EPA people as to what extent it hasd stirred up ancient lead dust to wreak its own kind of havoc in the wake of front-end tornado damage.

I would surely imagine that breathing and taking into the body by other means elements of lead ore would be harmful to the body and, as most anything else, there are always exceptions. The exceptions might explain why at least three people from Galena that I am aware of have lived to be 100 years old, and many more have lived well into their 90s.

While I would not expect research later on to indicate that breathing lead dust over a long period of time is beneficial to a human being, I have to wonder if it is truly the menace it is made out to be by today's standards, where even a flake of lead paint on a child's toy causes an uproar.

My Galena is in Kansas. Other Galenas exist in Missouri, Illinois, and elsewhere, but mostly in the geologic lead belt that supplied lead ore turned into bullets for most of the rifle munitions used in World War II. Other Galenas have different names, such as Picher. There are, in fact, hundreds of towns not named Galena in roughly a six-state area that could have been thus named.

I knew her as Norma Thompson in the 1950s when she was my music teacher. She died at age 100 on October 20, 2003, in Oswego, Kan. With a zest for life, she taught vocal music appreciation and stressed such things as inflection and proper breathing while vocalizing. She didn't live all her wonderful years in Galena, but she was in the immediate region all that time, breathing in the times, if you will.

Questions remain after all these years. Why do some suffer and die from lead exposure and why do others just as touched go on to lead long and normal lives?

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