Since the early 1970s, the medical community has cautioned hunters that fragments from lead bullets are spread through wild meat, and more recently the alerts were upgraded to an unofficial consumption advisory: There is no safe level of lead consumption in hunter-killed meat.

A University of Pittsburgh report on lead fragmentation in hunted deer, published in September in the American Journal of Public Health, was billed as the first study specifically focused on the presence of lead particles in venison donated by hunters to organizations that provide food to low income families.

Donated venison is often processed as ground meat, which recipients at food banks may serve to children without realizing it may present a health risk, said Samantha Totoni, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, lead of the project that authored the report.

With Saturday’s opening of the firearm deer season in Pennsylvania, hundreds of legally hunted deer will be donated to Hunters Sharing the Harvest, an independent program that has provided nearly two million pounds of hunter-harvested venison to food banks and homeless shelters since 1991. Similar programs exist in 40 states.

The Pitt report urges state governments, venison donation organizations and food distribution sites to make information about lead fragmentation clearly available to people who consume it. Totoni said she sees the work as an important contribution to a public health issue.

“For far too long, some groups have gotten away with telling hunters that a little bit of lead is OK to feed to your family,” she said. “But the science is clear on this and has been for a long time. There is no safe level of lead in the human body.”

The effects of lead

Since the 1980s, multiple studies on the ingestion of lead have concluded that element 82 on the periodic table, a dense heavy metal, affects the human body in sneaky ways. A Mayo Clinic warning on lead consumption says low levels can be virtually undetectable in standard testing, and even people who look healthy can be accumulating toxic lead.

According to the World Health Organization, almost 1 million people die every year from lead poisoning, and children are especially vulnerable.

Lead affects major organs contributing to a raft of maladies including high blood pressure, headaches, abdominal pain and a tingling in the hands and feet, all of which can be symptoms or contributing factors to more serious problems.

In men, low concentrations can cause abnormal sperm and reduced sperm count. In pregnant women, lead can induce premature birth, miscarriage or stillbirth. Crossing the placental barrier, lead can reduce birth weight and slow the growth of newborns. Symptoms of lead poisoning in children include developmental delays, learning difficulties, irritability, sluggishness and fatigue, abdominal pain, vomiting, constipation and problems such as hearing loss.

Lead in meat

Venison roasts, steaks, chops and cuts from areas far from a lead bullet’s entry wound often contain no lead. The radius of fragmentation, once believed to be about 5 inches, has been found to extend as far as 18 inches from the point of impact. Totoni said meat that is lead-free and tissue containing microscopic fragments are mixed in the ground venison distributed by hunter donation groups including Hunters Sharing the Harvest.

“It’s actually the worst because it’s all ground up together and the microscopic fragments of lead are all through it,” she said. “We reported that people who rely on donated venison are very often not well informed about the dangers associated with it, especially [dangers] to their children and pregnant women.”

There is no lead contained in commercially available venison, which does not come from hunter-harvested deer.

But hunter-donated venison may contain lead, and neither donated ground venison packaging nor distribution centers post consumption advisories informing their low-income recipients of the dangers of lead consumption.

Risk vs. benefit

Randy Ferguson, executive director of Hunters Sharing the Harvest, based in Greenville, Mercer County, suggested the nutritional value of protein in donated meat outweighs the potential harm.

“We caution against jumping to the conclusion that trace lead fragments in donated venison pose a considerable threat to public health,” he said.

A current CDC informational advisory on preventing childhood lead poisoning provides a long list of sources of lead exposure. It includes homes built prior to 1978, when lead-based paints were banned in the United States. Soil in backyards and playgrounds may be contaminated with the spillage of leaded gasoline and perhaps hundreds of years of accumulated exterior paint dust and smoke stack releases.

Water is a major source of lead exposure, whether supplied through wells and cisterns or city pipes, the CDC says. A Pittsburgh Water and Sewage Authority statement says its water passes lead-content testing before leaving treatment plants. It then flows through hundreds of miles of piping laid 100 years ago or more, however, much of it cast from lead.

Fragmentation from bullets in meat isn’t included on the CDC’s list of lead exposure sources.

“In 31 years of feeding Pennsylvania’s food insecure a total of nearly 2 million pounds of hunter-donated venison, we have never been presented with any examples of adverse effects from consuming donated venison,” Ferguson said. “On the contrary, we have heard countless accounts of hungry people with health issues that prevent them from consuming other meats due to their high fat content or other factors, who were given the opportunity to enjoy a lean, protein-rich meal because venison does not cause them the same ill effects that other meats do.”

And he noted that the meat is available sporadically and in small quantities.

“Donated venison is not consumed by recipients on a routine basis, nor is it typically consumed in large portions,” he said. “Most hunter-donated venison is consumed during community feeding events at food assistance centers in the form of single servings of approximately 3 ounces in dishes containing venison as one of their ingredients. Or it is distributed as individual 1- or 2-pound packages through food banks and shared equally among an entire family, again averaging 3-4 ounces per person.”

Travis Lau, a spokesman for the state Game Commission, said that while most deer are dropped by lead-tipped bullets, a growing number are harvested in archery seasons, including an early opportunity in Allegheny County that started in September. The use of high-power center-fire rifles is banned in Allegheny County, where hunters use rifled slugs fired from low-power shotguns. New types of ammunition are available that don’t contain lead.

The Pitt study confirms the absence of lead in hunting with archery, shotgun and lead-free ammunition gear.

“Hunters seem to better trust the reliable performance of lead when the law provides for that option, and it’s usually not as expensive as non-lead,” Lau said. “I would say it’s certain that more hunters each year are switching to non-lead ammunition because they see it as more environmentally friendly. But lead [ammunition] remains the favorite. For that, hunters and others who eat game meat often might encounter lead. But at the same time, most of those people probably won’t let that risk outweigh their enjoyment of game meat.”

Totoni grew up in Southwestern Pennsylvania on a diet that included venison given to her family by successful hunters from her neighborhood,

“I’m from Somerset and I’ve eaten lots of hunted meat,” she said. “This isn’t about hunting or guns or even eating donated venison that doesn’t have lead fragments.”

The point of the Pitt report, she said, is to inform people who bring donated meat home to their families about the potential risks. Totoni said her team’s research noted the low lead content in hunter-harvested food, but stressed that “there is no safe level of lead in the human body.”

Thomas Wilkins of Somerset County, a hunter for some 30 years, said struggling members of his family have been happy to get venison from programs supported by Hunters Sharing the Harvest and he has donated several deer to the program. He’s OK with the possibility that low levels of lead might be in his dinner — he’s been eating it all his life.

“I wouldn’t be opposed to signs at the food pantry informing people about possible health risks,” he said. “Warnings like that are everywhere on everything, cigarette packs, liquor bottles, restaurant menus. What would it hurt, as long as it’s accurate? It’s like comparing Diet Coke and Coke. Is diet pop good for you? No, but it’s not as bad as regular Coke.”