Bone Lead Testing Facility
The Mount Sinai Bone Lead Testing Facility is one of the country’s few centers providing a specialized technique for measuring long-term lead exposure. It is located in the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Primarily for research, in vivo, non-invasive, human bone-lead levels are measured with a technique called X-Ray Fluorescence that is both developed and used here.
Volunteer subjects are measured for federally funded research studies. Also measured are people who are referred to us by physicians because they have symptoms of lead toxicity or because the physician is concerned about lead exposure the patient may have suffered in the past. In the absence of documented exposure, the information obtained from bone-lead measurements can provide evidence of historical lead exposure.
Our Mission
Our mission is to learn about the associations between the amount of lead in our bodies and its effects on our health.
Meet the Director
Professor Andrew C. Todd measures lead in bone to assess cumulative lead exposure; directs the Insulators’ Tissue Bank, an asbestos-related disease research biorepository he developed for the Heat and Frost Insulators & Allied Workers union; and directs the World Trade Center Health Program General Responder Data Center at Mount Sinai that manages WTCHP data for over 55,000 general responders involved in the rescue and recovery efforts that followed the attacks on 9/11.
Professor Todd holds a PhD in Physics from The University of Birmingham in England. He is a Research Professor in the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he has been a faculty member since 1992 and was granted tenure in 2023. He was formerly a Visiting Professor at The University of Maryland (Baltimore), Program in Toxicology, and he remains an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins University, Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Professor Todd has been the Principal Investigator of numerous NIH-funded studies and a co-investigator on many others. His research has centered on both the development of in vivo bone lead measurements for the assessment of long-term lead exposure and on the application of those techniques to studies of human health. This work has been performed across the US and in several countries around the world, resulting in nearly 200 peer-reviewed publications.
Professor Todd has reviewed for the National Institutes of Health and the American Public Health Association, and for Environmental Research, Environmental Health Perspectives, JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), Medical Physics and Physics in Medicine and Biology. He is a Contributing Editor to the American Journal of Industrial Medicine.
In the aftermath of the WTC attacks, Professor Todd led all non-medical aspects of the provision of medical evaluation and subsequent treatment of WTC rescue and recovery workers. His compelling application to site the WTC General Responder Data Center at Mount Sinai was awarded in 2004. Professor Todd is currently the Director of this Center at Mount Sinai, recently re-funded by the CDC/NIOSH through 2027.
Professor Todd also developed, obtained funding for and now directs a North American tissue collection effort for lung cancer and mesothelioma in asbestos-exposed workers and their families.