The Minnesota Lead Poisoning Prevention Act is meant to protect children in our state from lead exposure. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stresses how critical it is to prevent exposure to lead. The CDC says lead can slow growth and development, damage the brain and nervous system, cause problems with hearing, and affect learning and behavior.

Both say there’s no level below which exposure to lead is OK, meaning we should avoid all exposures. Damage can be multi-generational when lead stored in bones is released and exposes developing babies during pregnancy. And damage can be disabling and permanent. That’s why we have unleaded gas and lead-free paint — those industries were required to remove lead from their products.

Tobacco products contain a variety of harmful chemicals. It’s well known that combustible products like cigarettes, cigars, cigarillos, and pipe and hookah tobacco release harmful chemicals when they’re burned. Products like vapes and e-cigarettes, collectively referred to as ENDS (electronic nicotine delivery systems), instead emit harmful chemicals in aerosolized clouds of liquid droplets and small particles. Emissions associated with both types of products — combustibles and non-combustibles — contain and therefore release lead and other harmful substances when they’re used.

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A study published this year reports lead among a variety of harmful chemicals in household dust. Likewise, our state and federal governments report household dust as a significant source of lead exposure. The CDC says, “Many children ingest lead dust by putting objects such as toys and dirt in their mouths.” That 2026 study reports, “Household tobacco use as a main source of toxic metals in home dust” and predicts eliminating tobacco emissions in the home would decrease lead in dust by 87%.

Studies published in 2006, 2008, 2015 and again in 2015, in 2018, 2019 and 2019, in 2021 and again in 2021, in 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026, for example (there are many more), alerted us about lead in combustible and non-combustible tobacco products. However, education from our state, our CDC and our EPA meant to prevent lead exposures excludes mention of exposures from tobacco products. And studies published, for example (there are many more), in 1988, 1992, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013 and again in 2013, in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 prove concerns about youth lead exposure from combustible and non-combustible products are not new.

Users of those products breathe in mainstream emissions. Non-users sharing the same spaces breathe in secondhand emissions coming off those products or that users exhale, and users breathe in secondhand emissions too. After those plumes of smoke and aerosol clouds disappear, harmful chemicals remain in thirdhand emissions.

Thirdhand emissions coat any exposed surface. They coat the walls, windows, floors and furniture — everything — in our homes and cars or any spaces where emissions from those products drift. They coat our skin and hair, our clothes and linens, our food and our children. Those harmful contaminants can then be reemitted back into the air we breathe. When you smell tobacco emissions on someone’s clothes or in a room where some time ago smokers smoked, you’re breathing in thirdhand emissions. However, you can’t always smell it, so you don’t always know.

The FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products has the authority to reduce or eliminate lead in tobacco products, but does not, via its ability to implement product standards — rules “that set requirements for how a tobacco product can be made” that “have the ability to significantly reduce tobacco-related disease and death.” Like those other industries that were required to comply, the FDA can tell the tobacco industry to get the lead out.

The FDA has raised concerns about lead in cosmetics. The agency announced the need to limit lead in foods for babies and young children in 2023, and then recalled applesauce contaminated with lead, it said, to protect kids. The agency said, “FDA is committed to reducing lead in food” and in 2025, those limits were finalized. Then later in 2025, the FDA warned about lead in cookware and in unapproved drugs.

In May 2025, Trump and then Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised transparency in their guarantees of Gold Standard Science at the FDA and government wide. However, they won’t warn us or protect our kids from lead and other contaminants associated with tobacco products. Lead is one of 111 harmfully and potentially harmful constituents in tobacco products for which the FDA must publish “…quantities in each brand and subbrand of tobacco product, in a way that people find understandable and not misleading.”

However, that information isn’t provided for thousands of products that produce and leave harmful emissions behind. It’s missing from the FDA’s July 17, 2025, decision to grant marketing orders for ENDS products. And the FDA failed to disclose that information when it allowed new ENDS to be sold in the U.S. on March 12, 2026, and again on May 5, 2026. 

A search of the FDA’s Searchable Tobacco Products Database, where the agency is to provide transparency, returns records associated with its decisions to allow the sale of tobacco products in the U.S. The FDA said on March 28, 2024, “The launch of this public database is part of the Center’s continued commitment to providing regulated industry with resources and providing clear communication about the agency’s actions to the public.” However, querying that database reveals problems. The most obvious is an increasing lack of transparency, where a query of all records returns a dash “—” where in previous years documents were linked. 

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In that database, the FDA shares five documents associated with its July 17, 2025, decision to allow the sale of ENDS products, an Order Letter, a Decision Summary, an Environmental Assessment, a FONSI or Finding of No Significant Impact, and a Correction Letter. Lead is mentioned only in the Environmental Assessment where the FDA says, “Heavy metals found in secondhand vapor from ENDS include chromium, iron, aluminum, lead, copper, nickel, and cadmium (Li et al., 2020) and silver (Hess et al., 2016). These metals may cause irritation to the respiratory system and respiratory damage.” The FDA only mentions “irritation to the respiratory system and respiratory damage” when it knows more. There’s no mention of the other very serious effects like brain damage. 

And more recently, the FDA shared even less — only an Order Letter and Correction Letter with its March 12, 2026, ENDS authorizations and only an Order Letter with its May 5, 2026, ENDS authorizations. There’s no mention of mainstream, secondhand or thirdhand emissions or lead, and it still failed to disclose information about those 111 substances the agency is required to share with us.

While the FDA expands the market of available tobacco products, our federal and state governments leave users and non-users, including our children, unaware and unprotected from things like lead and layers of toxic films that build up daily where tobacco products are used.

Christy Leppanen, Ph.D., lives in St. Paul and is an adjunct research professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. From 2021 to 2025, Leppanen was a toxicologist and reviewed applications for marketing orders for tobacco products at the FDA Center for Tobacco Products.

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