A year and a half ago we moved to California – with a new job, new friends, a 6-month-old baby and an old house in the hills needing renovation. Three months later, our daughter's routine lead blood test came back high. High blood lead levels? I was shocked, surprised and scared.

As a physician, I have learned about lead poisoning and I knew the traditional "risk factors": Low-income, inner-city kids get lead poisoning and it affects their intellectual development. Lead poisoning is a sad consequence of lead-based paints used prior to the 1970s and it tends to affect those who are least likely to live in newer or updated homes. I hardly considered that lead was a danger in my own semi-rural home. And my daughter wasn't chewing on windowsills with flaking paint either.

I immediately read more about what the elevated lead level meant and what I could do about it. It was clear that the renovations in our home, although relatively minor, had kicked up a lot of dust, from under the carpets we removed, from sawing through walls to install windows and from simply cleaning out a house that had been occupied for the past 40 years.

The American Academy of Family Physicians notes that more than 4 percent of children in the United States have lead poisoning.

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