Prevention of Lead Paint—or Prevention of Pica?

The otherwise excellent and timely statement on acute and chronic childhood lead poisoning of the Academy's Committee on Environmental Hazards and Subcommittee on Accidental Poisoning of the Committee on Accident Prevention1 has one serious omission. After calling attention to pica as a major factor in lead poisoning in young children, this fundamental cause for most cases of plumbism is disregarded. A basic part of the problem would appear to be how it attacks the reasons why the children eat the paint on the walls in the first place.