Grasping for a way to justify bypassing oversight by the California Fish & Game Commission (Commission) and to accelerate support in the legislature for a law that would impose a lead ammunition ban on all hunting in California (AB 711), lead ban proponents around the nation are now making the outrageous claim that there is a human health risk from consuming game meat harvested with lead am
Grasping for a way to justify bypassing oversight by the California Fish & Game Commission (Commission) and to accelerate support in the legislature for a law that would impose a lead ammunition ban on all hunting in California (AB 711), lead ban proponents around the nation are now making the outrageous claim that there is a human health risk from consuming game meat harvested with lead ammunition.
The recent escalation of claims regarding human health risks are scare tactics intended to demonize lead-based ammunition and justify lead ban proponents’ circumvention of the Commission, where the science regarding the use of lead ammunition was carefully being examined. Significantly, AB 711 proponents did not raise human health risks with the Commission as a reason for banning lead ammunition for hunting in California. Instead, they argued that condors were being poisoned by hunters’ lead ammunition. By changing the narrative from a threat to wildlife to a threat to humans, lead ban proponents seek to avoid the recent scrutiny and criticism of the faulty science behind AB 711, and to obfuscate their obvious attempt to pass a bill in the legislature without the Commission first critically analyzing the truth behind their claims.
Notwithstanding the unsubstantiated claims regarding human health risks, there is no clear evidence that the consumption of game meat has ever caused lead poisoning in humans. Indeed, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation stated that, "[t]o date, there are no reported human illnesses related to the consumption of wild game shot with lead ammunition."
The truth is that the average American adult has a higher blood-lead level than hunters who consumed a significant portion of their diet from game meat harvested with lead ammunition. This shows that alternative sources of lead exposure are a much greater health concern than eating game meat harvested with lead ammunition. The recent gambit to vilify lead-based ammunition as a serious human health risk ignores the known alternative sources of lead exposure to both humans and wildlife. But these radical environmental groups will not let the facts, which do not support their agenda, derail their campaign to "get the lead out."
To justify their scare tactics, these groups rely on unscientific reports claiming lead bullet fragments have been found in packaged game meat. Further, the studies cited by the AB 711 proponents utterly fail to establish any actual link to a human health risk for people consuming game meat harvested with lead ammunition.
One commonly referenced study from 2008 concerned blood-lead levels of North Dakota hunters that consumed game meat harvested with lead ammunition. In the 2008 study, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) attempted to determine whether a correlation existed between blood-lead levels in people who consumed game meat and those who did not, after learning of the 2007 report claiming to have found lead bullet fragments in packaged venison from North Dakota. However, the author of the 2007 report is a member of the Board of Directors for The Peregrine Fund, a member organization of the Condor Recovery Program that frequently publishes materials critical of hunters using of lead ammunition.
The 2008 CDC study compared blood-lead levels of North Dakotans that consumed game meat harvest with lead ammunition and blood-lead levels of North Dakotans that did not eat game meat. After taking blood samples from over 700 hunters and non-hunters, the CDC evaluated the effect of consuming varying amounts of game meat and its correlation to blood-lead levels.
After a suspicious manipulation of the data, the 2008 CDC report claimed that hunters who consumed game meat as a significant portion of their diet exhibited, on the average, nearly imperceptibly elevated blood-lead levels (0.30ug/dl) compared to the non-game consuming control group. This slight difference between the hunters’ blood-lead levels and those of the non-hunters’ is statistically insignificant, especially considering that the experimental error could not justify measurements to this level.
Most importantly, the CDC report also revealed that the hunters’ blood-lead levels were significantly less than the levels found in the average American!
According to the CDC, the action level for human health risk to children is (5ug/dl) or over, and the level of concern for adults is (10ug/dl) or over. By comparing those numbers with the levels reported in the CDC study, it is clear that, on average, hunters who consumed a significant portion of their diet from game meat had blood-lead levels nearly one-tenth of the CDC’s recommended level of concern for adults. In fact, only 8 of the 738 samples (all adults) in the CDC study exceeded the CDC’s (5ug/dl) action limit for children.
The real question is where is the lead found in the blood of the average American coming from? Alternative sources of lead are prevalent in our environment and likely account for the blood-lead levels found in the average American. For example, some of these alternative sources of lead are found in food products, which usually contain small but measurable amounts of lead. In their misinformation campaign, lead ban proponents fail to mention that lead is present in many of our common food items, and that most adult Americans exhibit an average blood-lead level between (1.5 and 2.2ug/dl) . In fact, a study done by the FDA implicated over 300 common food items that contain lead, including children’s supplemental vitamins, canned fruits and boiled shrimp.
Another lead exposure risk was revealed in California earlier this year when over 1,500 baby food and children’s juice products were tested for compliance with Proposition 65, which requires warning labels on items containing elevated levels of certain chemicals and compounds. Over 100 of these common food items tested contained elevated levels of lead, including common products like Gerber baby food, Del Monte fruit cocktails and Kroger Fruit mix. Based upon these facts, it is easy to infer that one may be more likely to have elevated blood-lead levels from food found at a local grocery store than from consuming game meat harvested with lead ammunition.
A quote from the 2008 CDC report perfectly summarizes this point:
Despite this reality, AB 711 proponents are misconstruing and misrepresenting the findings in the 2008 CDC report and are citing it as evidence that there is a significant human health risk from consuming game meat harvested with lead ammunition. But the results from the CDC study and the FDA’s actual findings in California clearly show that the AB 711 proponents’ fear mongering and hypocrisy are simply good old-fashioned scare tactics meant to misinform and mislead the legislators, agency personnel and the public.
For more information on the facts and the truth regarding the lead ammunition debate, visit www.HuntForTruth.org.