Advancing Global Lead Risk Assessment with EPA’s All Ages Lead Model (AALM): A Crucial Tool for Addressing Lead Exposure

At Pure Earth, we are dedicated to solving the global childhood lead poisoning crisis and ensuring healthier environments for all. Lead exposure is a silent threat that harms millions, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, where unregulated industries, contaminated consumer products, and legacy pollution continue to poison communities. For decades, efforts to reduce lead exposure have been hampered by a lack of tools that offer comprehensive, reliable predictions of lead’s impact across all ages and exposure scenarios. That changed with the introduction of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) All Ages Lead Model (AALM), now in v3.0.

With the AALM, researchers can estimate blood and tissue lead levels for different population groups, run remediation scenarios to predict how lead levels would change if interventions were made, and guide public health messaging and prioritize interventions for those most at risk. This kind of modeling empowers governments and organizations like Pure Earth to respond with data-driven strategies that maximize impact, even when resources are limited.

“AALM is an invaluable tool for modeling the human impact and kinetics of lead exposure from a myriad of sources for given conditions,” said Gordon Binkhorst, Senior Technical Advisor at Pure Earth.

This tool represents a major step forward in lead risk assessment. It enhances our collective ability to predict and prevent harmful exposures. At Pure Earth, we work with governments, communities, and partners around the world to assess and clean up lead-contaminated sites. A comprehensive and adaptable tool like the AALM has the potential to significantly improve the way we design, target, and evaluate our interventions.

What is the AALM?

The All Ages Lead Model (AALM) is a state-of-the-art computational tool developed by the U.S. EPA to estimate lead intake, absorption, accumulation, and elimination from the human body. It calculates lead concentrations in blood and tissues based on exposures through air, water, soil, dust, diet, and other sources.

Crucially, the AALM models these impacts across the entire lifespan—from birth to 90 years—providing a comprehensive view of lead’s health impacts at every stage of life. It is the first tool of its kind that gives health officials, researchers, and environmental experts a dynamic way to estimate lead’s toxicokinetics in both short-term and long-term scenarios.

This is especially important for understanding acute and chronic exposure risks in children and adults, and the cumulative body burden of lead over time, an area of growing concern for public health professionals.

From IEUBK to AALM: A Major Leap Forward

For years, the go-to tool for lead exposure risk assessment was the Integrated Exposure Uptake Biokinetic Model (IEUBK). While valuable, the IEUBK model was limited to predicting blood lead levels in children up to age 7 and exposure intervals of at least 13 weeks. That narrow focus constrained its usefulness for projects seeking to understand multigenerational or community-wide exposure risks.

The AALM fills those gaps. Compared to the IEUBK, it offers several key advantages that are particularly beneficial to global stakeholders working to address lead poisoning:

Wider age coverage: The AALM can simulate exposures from infancy through old age, capturing the full arc of lead’s impact on human health.
Tissue-specific lead distribution: Instead of just modeling blood lead levels, AALM predicts lead concentrations in bones, organs, and soft tissue, offering a richer picture of body burden, which is largely due to accumulation in bone over time.
Flexibility across contexts: AALM can simulate short-term or acute exposures (as brief as one day) and extended, chronic exposures, making it ideal for diverse environmental settings.
Global applicability: The model allows users to input locally relevant exposure data—such as soil and dust lead levels and their bioavailability, water sources, and dietary habits—making it a powerful tool for use beyond the U.S.

Why This Matters for Global Lead Poisoning Efforts

In many low- and middle-income countries where Pure Earth works, the sources of lead exposure are complex and often unregulated. These include informal recycling of lead-acid batteries; use of lead in pottery, metal cookware, spices, cosmetics, and traditional medicines; industrial emissions from mining and e-waste processing; and lead-based paints.

Lead exposure is frequently widespread, affecting not just children but entire families and communities. As we seek to understand exposure dynamics in these contexts, the AALM’s ability to model lifetime exposures across different tissues offers new and vital insights.

With the AALM, we can:

Design smarter interventions: By modeling specific exposure pathways, we can prioritize actions that will yield the greatest health impact;for example, remediating a contaminated soil site that contributes significantly to children’s and adults’ cumulative lead intake.
Support national surveillance programs: In countries that lack widespread biomonitoring capacity, AALM can estimate body burdens using available environmental data, acting as a powerful proxy tool in the absence of blood lead testing.
Strengthen advocacy with data: Policymakers respond to clear, quantitative evidence. AALM outputs can demonstrate how specific policy changes—such as regulating lead in consumer goods or enforcing safer battery recycling—can reduce long-term health risks and societal costs.
Model intergenerational impacts: The AALM does not estimate lead levels in a developing fetus, however, it can be used to estimate a maternal blood lead level. Infants are born with a blood lead level that is about 0.9 of their mother’s.

This tool is useful for organizations or individuals conducting risk assessments for lead, including government agencies, medical and health researchers, and public health professionals. For example, in 2024, the AALM was used by researchers to model lead exposure risks from the consumption of contaminated turmeric in countries across South Asia. In a study on potential exposure from lead-contaminated cookware, led by Pure Earth, blood lead levels were modeled using the AALM for a range of leachable lead concentrations in the context of potential impact from eating food cooked in lead-containing aluminum pots.

A Tool for the Future

As global awareness of the lead poisoning crisis grows, so does the need for better tools to inform and evaluate solutions. The AALM can play a pivotal role in national action plans on lead, prioritization of contaminated sites, training programs for environmental health professionals, and multilateral donor strategies focused on pollution and public health.

The All Ages Lead Model marks a transformative moment in the global fight against lead poisoning. It reflects a nuanced understanding of how lead moves through the human body and how we can stop it. As we continue to work in communities around the world, this tool strengthens our ability to protect not just young children, but people of all ages from the devastating effects of lead.

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