Image used for representational purpose only.(Express Illustrations)
BENGALURU: Health professionals at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (Nimhans) have recommended the use of lead care kits for employees working in the industrial sector which they say will help in the detection of the dissolution of metal in their bloodstream.
Ahana Bhattacharya, PhD scholar from Clinical Psychopharmacology and Neurotoxicology Department, said the employees working in industries are frequently exposed to heavy metals like lead which gets dissolved in their blood. If unchecked, it can affect a person’s brain and can aggravate diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and other disorders.
High metal content in blood can also cause cognitive impairment in a person and hence must be diagnosed early, Bhattacharya said. She said stricter laws must be put in place in industries to carry out regular tests to study the metal concentration in an industry worker’s blood. Even the waste disposal in metal industries is not regularised which is an added cause of increased metal threshold, she added, suggesting a four-bin disposal set up to segregate metal waste making its disposal easy.
A lab technician at Nimhans explained that in case metal found in blood is more than 5 micrograms, it is hazardous. Some experts at the Nimhans National Science Day Expo also showcased several other technologies healthcare which help in studying behavioural patterns of patients and curate appropriate data from it. They explained the world has become data driven.
