For Lead Net, Pure Earth, NYC DOH, State DOHs, Community Clinics
A free, adaptive lead-risk screener your community can use today.
Built from the named exposure pathways tracked by NYC DOH, WA State DOH, CDC, Pure Earth, and Tamara Rubin / Lead Safe Mama. Adapts to each family's background — uses the names they'd recognize (azarcón, ghasard, kohl, paylooah, daw tway, leadlight, etc.). Generates a printable doctor intake form. Free for any public-health program. White-labelled or hosted on your site.
What you get, free
A 22-question screener calibrated against the FDA Interim Reference Level (3 µg/day for children under 6, 8.8 for pregnant/breastfeeding, 12.5 for adults). Each named exposure pathway carries an estimated µg/day weight pulled from the published lead-exposure literature. The result is an estimated daily intake, color-coded against the FDA limit, with an itemized breakdown of contributors.
At the end, the patient downloads a one-page intake form for their visit. The form lists the pathways flagged in their answers, the suggested clinical orders (BLL, iron studies for under-6, calcium/vitamin D for pregnant patients), and suggested environmental sampling for their specific risk profile.
We'll either give you a single HTML file you can paste on your site, or we'll host a custom-branded version on detectlead.com pointed at your domain. No charge. The point is reach.
What it adapts to
- Cultural connection: 10 regional groupings, each with their own real terminology
- Age group: child under 6, pregnant/breastfeeding, adult
- Country (US/Canada/UK/AU pre-regulation paint years)
- Occupational exposure (12 named professions + take-home dust)
- Hobbies (stained glass, ceramics, ammunition, antiques)
- Pica + iron deficiency (4-5x absorption multiplier for kids)
- Bone-stored lead (pregnancy, menopause, fracture)
Adaptive terminology, not euphemisms
Most lead-screening tools ask "Do you use any imported eye cosmetics?" A South Asian grandmother who applies kajal to her grandchild's eyes every morning will say no. She doesn't think of kajal as "imported eye cosmetics" — she thinks of it as kajal. This screener asks the question with the names she'd use.
South Asia
Kohl, kajal, surma, sindoor, kumkum, ghasard, bali goli, kandu, ghutti, ayurvedic, brass pital, Bangladesh turmeric
Pulls from CDC, NYC DOH, and Pure Earth's spice/cosmetics studies (Bangladesh turmeric and lead chromate).
Latin America
Azarcón / alarcón / coral / luiga / maria luisa / rueda, greta, Mexican glazed pottery (barro vidriado), talavera, lozeena, vero mango candies
From CDC's folk-medicine inventory, NYC DOH "Look Out for Lead," and FDA candy recalls.
East / Southeast Asia
Ba-baw-san, bo ying compound, lo li, paylooah (Hmong/Vietnamese), daw tway (Thai/Myanmar), Cambodian herbal preparations
From CDC, MN Dept of Health, and CA DOH community health worker programs.
Middle East / North Africa
Kohl, surma, alkohol, ithmid, Iraqi lozeena, Aleppo chili, brass and copper pots
From WA State DOH refugee-health programs and CDC.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Tiro, tozali, kwalli, traditional bitters, aluminum scrap cookware, palm oil sources
From Pure Earth's ULAB recycling work and CDC immigrant-health bulletins.
Australia / NZ
Leadlight (stained glass), pre-1970 painted homes in leaded communities (Broken Hill, Port Pirie, Mount Isa, Boolaroo, Esperance, Lake Macquarie), tankwater, chooks on inner-city soil
From The LEAD Group Inc. (Australia, est. 1991, Elizabeth O'Brien's body of work).
How to deploy it
Try the master
5 minutes. Run yourself or have a colleague try it. Confirm the questions and weights match what your population needs.
Open the builder
From the result page, click "Build my version." Pick which questions to keep, name it, optionally add a background image, language preference.
Pick a deployment
Self-hosted: Download a single HTML file you paste on your site. Works on any host.
We host it: Email Eric, we put it at detectlead.com/pages/<your-slug> and you point your traffic there.
Iterate
Anonymous feedback box on every result page. Patients (and you) flag questions that didn't make sense, suggest missing pathways, or request translations. We update the master.
“If we can name what we're looking for in the language the family already uses,
we find lead in places a generic checklist would miss.”
— the design philosophy
Source authority & data
Every named pathway in the screener is documented by at least one of:
NYC DOH · Look Out for Lead campaign
WA State DOH · Common Sources of Lead Exposure
CDC NCEH · Folk medicines, cosmetics, spices
Pure Earth · Global Lead Program (rapid market screening across 25 LMICs)
FDA · Interim Reference Level + lead-in-foodware studies
Tamara Rubin · Lead Safe Mama (XRF and ICP-MS testing)
The LEAD Group Inc. (AU) · Elizabeth O'Brien's 30+ years of work
Stanford / Forsyth · Bangladesh turmeric & lead chromate
The µg/day weights per pathway are conservative midpoints from the published source studies. They're not precision values — they're order-of-magnitude estimates designed to flag stacking exposures. If your program has tighter data (specific cohort means, paint-loading from your housing stock, etc.), we can plug them in for your hosted version.
What this costs
$0
to use the master version
$0
to download a self-hosted HTML
$0
for us to host a branded version on detectlead.com
$0
to fork the question bank (CC-BY-SA)
The screener is free because more eyes on lead exposure pathways = fewer poisoned kids. DetectLead sells lead-detection kits to consumers; this is upstream of that, and we'd rather have it deployed widely. Sponsoring orgs (Pure Earth, Lead Net, state DOHs) are welcome to add their logo and call-to-action to a hosted version.
Run a screening program? Email us.
We'll help you tailor the question set to your population, draft any translations you need (top 5 immigrant-health languages on the roadmap), and either give you the HTML or host it for you. Most setups take under a day.