THIS TIME ON CODE WACK!
Imagine discovering that your infant child—your nine-month-old baby—has lead poisoning – a toxin banned from paint and phased out of gasoline decades ago. So why do thousands of children each year have dangerously high levels of lead in their system?
We spoke with New York mom, nurse, and advocate Shannon Burkett, whose son Cooper developed lead poisoning that stole his words, halted his development, and nearly cost him his life. Shannon is also the writer, producer, and editor of the podcast LEAD: How This Story Ends Is Up to Us, which had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival 2025, starring Merritt Wever and Cynthia Nixon. She’s a registered nurse, a mother of three, and a fierce voice in the fight to end lead poisoning.
This is the first of a two-part series with Shannon Burkett.
Check out the Transcript and Show Notes for more!
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SHOW NOTES
WE DISCUSS
When this all started back in 2008, when did you first sense something might be wrong with your then-infant son Cooper? Were there any signs? How did you find out it was lead poisoning?
“… he actually wasn’t showing any signs or symptoms at the very beginning. It was [through] a routine test [that we discovered it]. So he was tested at nine months, thank goodness, because the law is between nine and 12 [months]. And my pediatrician chose nine months, which, you know, probably really saved his life because within that month I had taken out toys from storage that were contaminated from the infestation.
“So he was crawling around, initially getting a very low level of lead exposure, which we didn’t know in that one month.
“He went from, you know, responding to his name saying, ‘mama’ ‘dadda,’ ‘hi,’ ‘bye,’ ‘Ala’ to nothing. No pointing, no real communication with him. So we saw his [blood lead] levels when they went from nine up to 19, we saw this frightening regression of development with him and then we really knew something was wrong. ” – Shannon Burkett
What was your initial reaction?
“[It] really hit me like a ton of bricks because there’s so much mom guilt and you know when you’re told something like lead poisoning … it’s like calling and saying, ‘oh they have smallpox’ because you’re like, ‘wait a second, didn’t we take care of this? … This is not something that happens now. This is something that happens, you know, from lead [paint] and gasoline and didn’t we take care of this? Wasn’t this like an eighties, nineties problem?’
“So to hear that my son had lead poisoning, I first of course was really terrified and also really confused and also felt really guilty… ” – Shannon Burkett
Walk us through how you figured out what the source of the exposure was for Cooper.
“That’s a really interesting question in that I didn’t figure it out. For an entire month, my pediatrician was like, ‘take off your shoes, wash his hands.’ When you know, he goes in the sandbox, [you] look at everything that he touches and it creeps into your mind. You start looking at the whole world very differently in almost like a paranoid manner. And we had signed up for this 9/11 study, this government program because we lived downtown [in New York City] and we wanted to make sure our apartment was still safe …
“… when we found out that Cooper’s levels had gone up to 19, I called the EPA specialist who was assigned to our case.
“… she brought her boss, Mark, who both of them, again, I keep saying ‘saved my son’s life,’ but they really did because we had no idea how he was getting sick. And Mark came in and looked at my walls and he has his PhD, he did his doctorate on lead. So the guy knows lead. And he walked in and he’s like, ‘no, your walls are intact.’
“And we looked at the toys, we looked at my dishes, we looked through everything and then, you know, I’d always been suspicious because of that dust. That dust … it was in every inch of our apartment. The construction site below our apartment contaminated our apartment with dust for months, months and months.” – Shannon Burkett
Helpful Links
LEAD: How This Story Ends Is Up to Us, Shannon Burkett
Wide Disparities in Childhood Lead Poisoning Revealed by City-Level Data, Drexel University, Urban Health Collaborative
State Lead Statutes, National Conference of State Legislators
Lead poisoning, Mayo Clinic
Lead, United States Environmental Protection Agency
Episode Transcript
Read the full episode transcript.
Biography: Shannon Burkett
Shannon Burkett is the writer/producer/editor of LEAD: how this story ends is up to us (Tribeca Film Festival 2025) starring Merritt Wever & Cynthia Nixon.
Her musical The Female Pope was awarded the Jonathan Larson Grant, Pipeline Arts Award, and developed at JMF Goodspeed, GF Berkeley Rep, and NAMT. Her award-winning short films have screened at Cannes, Woodstock, and many more.
As an actor, she appeared on Broadway alongside Patrick Stewart in Arthur Miller’s The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, many Off-Broadway shows, TV & Film.
Learn more at shannonburkett.com
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