I had to laugh at some of the hysterical over-reaction to this "news" (duh, there's lead in Paul-Son's chips). The best was the comment by Will Humble, the so-called "health services official" for the state of Arizona, who was "shocked" and said:

"If you were to take chips like these and spread them out, 1,000 of them on the ground, essentially it would be a federal Superfund site. That's how much lead is in these things. I've been doing this for many, many years and seldom do we come across products that contain this much lead that are in people's homes."

The most frigthening aspect of this entire situation is that We the People have been paying this blithering idiot to provide "health services" protection for "many, many years".

So, here's the deal ...

Lead can be very dangerous, under the right (or should I say, wrong) conditions. Ingesting or inhaling lead vapors or dust can be extremely detrimental to human health.

However (and there's almost always an "however"), even the federal EPA acknowledges that inorganic lead or lead compounds, such as the lead in casino chips, can be absorbed through intact skin only in very small quantities. See their website at:

http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/leadsafe/leadinf3.htm

Tetraethyl lead (lead-based gasoline) can be absorbed through the skin in sufficient quantity to constitute a health hazard. Finely-powdered lead or lead nitrate solution placed directly on the skin can be absorbed and the rate of absorption increases with sweating. However (there's that word again), such absorption results in no measureable increase in blood-lead levels (most likely indicating that it is also rapidly eliminated through sweat and other extracellular fluids). For a brief discussion of skin absorption, see the study at:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=3238426

Although not ultimately definitive, this study supports the conclusion that skin exposure to inorganic lead is not a significant health hazard.

Caveat: even organic lead can be absorbed more quickly through an open skin wound, so you might not want to rub a Paul-Son chip directly on such a wound (though the blood would undoubtedly damage the chip a lot more than the chip would damage your body).

The long and the short of it is, you could roll around naked in your chip collection 24 hours a day for the rest of your life and, as long as you don't have any gaping wounds and don't work up too much of a sweat in the process, you wouldn't suffer any ill effects.

Hell, even if you ate the damn things, your body would eliminate most of the clay without digesting it and the lead would pass harmlessly through your system.