In a village in Bangladesh, a boy named Saim no longer knows what grade he is in. Before a group of men arrived to melt down old car batteries on a leased plot of land nearby, his mother says he did well in school and could remember things. Then, gradually, he forgot everything. Drew McCartor, who runs a nonprofit called Pure Earth, met Saim during a cleanup effort in that community and has spent the years since turning that single image into a global intervention plan with a concrete timeline and a country-by-country roadmap.
Why a billion kids are losing ground right now
The scale of what McCartor describes at a TED conference is genuinely difficult to absorb. More than one billion children and teenagers worldwide currently have lead concentrations in their blood that exceed the World Health Organization’s threshold for intervening in a child’s life. That is one in three kids on Earth. In low- and middle-income countries, where the overwhelming majority of these children live, the average exposure level is high enough to cost a child an estimated four to five IQ points permanently. That shift is not trivial on a population scale: it cuts in half the number of children who would otherwise score above 130, and increases by half the number scoring below 70, where intellectual disability begins.
By McCartor’s estimate, lead robs the world’s youngest children of more than 2 million IQ points on any given day, and then again the next day, and the next. The damage does not stop at cognition either. In 2023, lead-linked cardiovascular disease, primarily heart attacks and strokes, claimed more lives than all active wars, all natural disasters, all road traffic accidents, and HIV and malaria combined.
The mechanism is specific and brutal. Lead mimics calcium in the developing brain. Because a child’s brain relies on calcium to direct the construction of synaptic connections, it will reach for lead when calcium signals are present. McCartor put it plainly: lead is ‘a terrible city planner,’ building dead-end streets and bridges to nowhere inside a brain that was supposed to be laying the roads for memory, learning, and impulse control. Once built, that chaotic network is permanent.
Three steps that already cut lead levels by 75 percent in one country
What McCartor argues most forcefully is that this is not a problem waiting on new technology, political alignment, or prohibitive funding. Pure Earth has been testing prevention strategies for 25 years, and a three-step model has emerged with documented results.
First, governments run a nationally representative blood-lead survey of a few thousand children to establish a baseline. Second, they identify the dominant local exposure sources, which vary sharply by region and can include lead-pigmented spices, traditional cosmetics and medicines, ceramic glazes, cheap aluminum cookware, and industrial pollution. Third, they regulate and remove those sources through tighter standards, stronger enforcement, and contaminated-site cleanup.
Georgia used exactly this sequence after a 2018 national survey conducted with UNICEF found that 41 percent of Georgian children exceeded the WHO threshold. Pure Earth helped the government trace the primary driver to lead-based pigments added to spices to produce bright orange and red colors. After the government tightened regulations and enforcement, lead levels in the hardest-hit regions dropped by 75 percent.
Similar work is now underway in the Philippines, Ghana, and Mexico, among dozens of other countries.
Saim, and the half billion kids still ahead of the damage
With backing from the Audacious Project donor community, Pure Earth is rolling out this model across more than 20 countries that are collectively home to 500 million lead-poisoned children. McCartor projects that over the next eight years the program will improve the intellectual capacity, health, and longevity not only of those children but of every generation coming up behind them.
What lead took from Saim cannot be given back. His mother’s account of the boy he was before the battery recyclers arrived stays exactly where it is.
For every child whose brain is still under construction right now, the window is still open.
