Abstract

The authors conducted this study to evaluate some differences in blood lead levels between inner-city and suburban children and obtain the basic data of the reference value of the blood lead concentrations in children. The subjects were composed of 102 children residing in inner-city and 86 children in suburban. Their age range were 6 to 8 years old and the obtained results were as follow; 1. The arithmetic means of the blood lead level in male and fenlale, male, and female children were 7.24, 7,40, 7.08 microgram/100ml, and geometric means were 6.92, 7.08, 6.76 microgram/100ml, respectively. 2. The children residing in inner-city had the higher blood lead levels both male and female than suburban children with statistical signficance (p < 0.05) 3. Seventeen percent of the total subjects had lead cencentrations ( 5 microgram/100ml, and 5.88% of inner-city children and 30.23 % of suburban children had this lead values. But in > or = 10 microgram/100ml group, the inner-city children (20.39 %) were more distributed than suburban chilren(2.33 %) , and 12.33 % of total subjects had this lead values.

• Keywords: Blood lead levels;Children;Inner-city and suburban