Are you at risk for lead poisoning?

A free, evidence-based screener that asks about your home, your work, and the items in your kitchen and bathroom. It adapts to your background and skips questions that do not apply to you. You get a clear risk picture, the specific exposure pathways your answers flag, and what to do about each.

~5 minutes · No email required · Doctor handout PDF at the end
Built on public-health guidance and open lead-exposure data from
NYC DOH · Look Out for Lead
Pure Earth · Global Lead Program
WA State DOH · Imported Products
CDC CLPPP · Foods/Cosmetics/Medicines
The LEAD Group · Australia

Why this matters

The CDC has no safe blood lead level for children. Most exposures are invisible: a chalking window sill, a brass cooking pot, a daily teaspoon of contaminated turmeric, take-home dust on a parent's clothes. The biggest sources are usually not the obvious ones.

How it works

Each answer is weighted by how strongly it contributes to lead exposure in the published public-health literature. We combine your answers and benchmark them against FDA Interim Reference Level guidance to place you in a risk level, then explain each flagged pathway and what to do about it.

Adaptive questions

If you tell us you have South Asian, Latin American, Middle Eastern, African, East Asian, or other connections, we use the names you'd actually recognize: kohl, sindoor, ghasard, azarcón, greta, paylooah, daw tway, tiro, lozeena, leadlight, instead of generic descriptions.

What you get at the end

Your risk level, the specific items in your environment your answers flagged with a plain-language explanation of why each one matters, and a printable PDF you can hand your doctor or pediatrician asking for a blood lead test, iron studies, and any environmental sampling that makes sense given your answers.

Sources

These are the sources used to build this screener. Its questions, weightings, and explanations are drawn from publicly available lead-exposure guidance and surveillance literature. No copyrighted text is reproduced. Everything here is paraphrased and synthesized into plain language.

  • U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. Federal exposure-source guidance and poisoning-cluster literature.
  • U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Interim Reference Level guidance and lead findings in food, spices, and cosmetics.
  • U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Lead in drinking water and soil guidance.
  • New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, "Look Out for Lead." Imported foods, cosmetics, and traditional-remedy guidance.
  • Washington State Department of Health. Imported-product lead surveillance.
  • Pure Earth, Global Lead Program and Rapid Market Screening. Global cookware, spice, and informal-recycling exposure data.
  • Stanford University lead-in-turmeric research. Origin tracing of adulterated turmeric.
  • The LEAD Group Inc. (Australia). Australian leaded-community and household guidance.

U.S. federal materials (CDC, FDA, EPA) are works of the United States Government and carry no domestic copyright. They are in the public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105. State and municipal public-health materials (NYC Health, Washington State Department of Health) are public records published for public-health education and free redistribution. Pure Earth and The LEAD Group Inc. publish their lead-exposure findings openly for non-commercial public-health use and are cited here by attribution. Academic findings are cited by attribution under standard scholarly use. If you believe a source is misattributed or out of date, please flag it through the feedback link in the screener.