The Effect of Lead Contamination in Drinking Water on a Young Population

In developing a lead sensor for our project, we were curious about the effects of lead contamination in the water supply on small children. How do their bodies metabolize it? Where does it go? We began to get pretty appalled by the devastating effects lead can have on the human body and how long it can persist even after the initial exposure. Many journals report that there can be devastating neurological and physiological impairments from even the smallest exposure and would report seeing these effects at different concentrations of lead in the blood (***table of examples?***).

Unfortunately none were able to point to a level of lead exposure and a resulting concentration range of lead in the blood. Without this, we couldn't really gauge what level of lead exposure and for how long a person could be exposed to lead and miss out on the devastating health benefits. So we decided to try and model it!

We began with a thorough examination of the literature looking for important details on how much lead is absorbed into the body, where the absorbed lead goes, and how long it stays in the body. From there, we created a simple mass balance for the amount of lead entering the body versus the amount of lead leaving the body. We decided to treat the blood and bones of the human body as two different systems in order to more accurately model how the body metabolizes lead and processes it. none are able to go so far and correlate lead contamination with the concentration of lead in the blood. were able to point to a concentration of lead exposure and give a probability of we couldn't seem to find data that linked level of lead contamination and exposure duration with aWe were interested in quantifying the exact concentration of lead a child might have in their blood stream and how much might end up in their bones.