Leaded Silk

Miss P. Belle Kessinger of Pennsylvania State College pulled a rat out of a warm, leaded-silk sack, noted that it had died of lead poisoning, and proceeded to Manhattan. There last week she told the American Home Economics Association that leaded silk garments seem to her potentially poisonous. Her report alarmed silk manufacturers who during the past decade have sold more than 100,000,000 yards of leaded silk without a single report of anyone's being poisoned by their goods. Miss Kessinger's report also embarrassed Professor Lawrence Turner Fairhall, Harvard chemist, who only two years ago said: "No absorption of lead occurs even under extreme conditions as a result of wearing this material in direct contact with the skin."

Professor Fairhall was doubly confident of his information. He had soaked squares of the silk in body secretions (perspiration, saliva, urine) and in other fluids with which silk garments might touch (distilled water, tap water, salt water). None of the lead in the silk dissolved.

Professor Fairhall had also given leaded-silk underwear and nightgowns to four women whose ages ranged from 17 to 50 years. None of the women showed signs of having absorbed any lead from the silk, after six weeks of work, wear and wash.

Miss Kessinger, who doubted Professor Fairhall's results, made some little sacks of leaded silk. Into each sack she tied a rat and kept it there with only its head exposed for an hour a day. At first she perceived no changes. Then rapidly the rats' skins became irritated. One rat died. And Miss Kessinger became bold enough to question the professor's dictum.

Lead is a cumulative poison, long exposure to which destroys nerves; makes wrists droop; puts a blue-black margin on the gums; causes colic. Chronic lead poisoning is hard to cure. At the Cleveland meeting of the American Medical Association (TIME, June 25), however, Dr. Irving Gray of Brooklyn recounted his success in expelling lead.

Dr. Gray puts his lead patients on a diet low in calcium, high in phosphorus. They avoid milk, most important source of calcium, and eat quantities of phosphorous-rich eggs, whole wheat bread, lamp chops, liver, green peas, pineapple juice, baked potatoes, halibut. The deleading must not go on too rapidly, said Dr. Gray, otherwise the lead may be disastrously shifted into the central nervous system.

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