To Live, Not Only Survive

This chapter provides an introduction to the contested dynamics between medical knowledge, public policy, and grassroots political action. The chapter examines how lead’s victims and their advocates responded to a once “invisible” and newly recognized environmental disease. It also analyzes official state responses in relation to international biomedical and public-health intervention norms and practices. The chapter argues the state’s Official Protocol worked to minimize the parameters of lead-poisoning risk by, among other measures, raising international action thresholds—doubling the threshold for the lead level in blood and quintupling it for that in water. It conformed a set of de-facto policies and regulatory interventions focusing and circumscribing state action on lead poisoning within the spatial realm of squatter settlements, the cultural realm of the urban poor, and the ecological realm of soil.