Kelly O’Grady began to suspect four years ago that two of her four children might have attention deficit disorder.
A son was showing disruptive and aggressive behavior. Her daughter, then in Grade 1, was struggling.
“She would come home crying and saying that the work was too hard,” recalls O’Grady, a registered nurse from Pembroke, Ont.
“She was quite discouraged.”
That was in 1996.
Since then, O’Grady has unearthed research that she thinks points to the source of her children’s difficulties. The culprit, she says, was lead, a heavy metal that can accumulate in a body’s organs and bones.
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Her studies suggest lead toxicity in children can trigger the symptoms of attention deficit disorder.
In her children’s case, she thinks the lead might have come from the well water her family was drinking four years ago. O’Grady said her suspicions were confirmed by an elemental analysis of her children’s hair.
Hair is one place where traces of heavy metals in the body can be found.
Test difficult to get
An elemental analysis of hair is proving reliable as a measure of heavy metal toxicity but O’Grady found such a test is not readily available in Canada. She wants the federal government to change that. She does not believe blood testing, the most common method used in Canada to gauge lead toxicity, is as accurate.
Based on results of the hair analysis, O’Grady decided to send her children for chelation, a treatment to remove plaque from the blood stream and heavy metals from the body. The merits of such a treatment are accepted in several provinces but are debated in others.
O’Grady’s daughter is now a B student in school. The son who four years ago was showing behavioral problems is now in Grade 2 and doing quite well, she said.
“My children probably wouldn’t have been treated (with chelation) on the basis of blood tests.”
O’Grady’s desire to see hair analysis more readily available was recently brought to the attention of the Federated Women’s Institutes of Canada.
The FWIC passed a resolution at its triennial convention in Brandon urging the Canadian Medical Association to accept hair elemental analysis as a way to measure heavy metal toxicity.
A related resolution requests that chelation therapy be made accessible to children showing developmental delays or intellectual or behavioral impairments due to lead and heavy metal toxicity.
Increase awareness
A third resolution calls on the federal health minister to launch a nationwide campaign to raise public awareness of chronic lead toxicity. The focus would be on the poison sources as well as its effects on behavior and learning.
The ultimate goal, according to the resolution, would be a nationwide program for children ages three to five to screen for lead and other heavy metals such as cadmium, nickel, arsenic and mercury.
Hair elemental analysis would be the FWIC’s preferred choice for that screening.
Other resolutions were passed at the FWIC’s triennial convention.
- A request that the federal government recognize and pursue a policy that maintains Canada’s sovereignty over its domestic water resources.
- A request that it be mandatory for manufacturers of processed food to declare its trans-fatty acid content, with warning statements if the trans-fatty levels are too high. The same resolution calls on the federal health minister to impose maximum tolerances for such acids in foods.
- A call for federal legislation that would outlaw the use of a hand-held cell phone while operating a motor vehicle.
- A request that Ottawa set guidelines to regulate the size of containers used in packaging. The FWIC wants containers to better correspond with the size of the contents, preventing wasteful packaging.
