His medical sleuthing revealed that even minuscule levels of lead caused
profound damage to health and cognition, a discovery that helped propel the phaseout of lead in gasoline in 1976.
Dr Burgess added: «Amongst our allied
health professions, what we did know about from decades of research and hundreds of case studies, is that bilateral
damage to the hippocampal and / or diencephalon structures causes
profound amnesia, and in the absence of apparent structural
damage to these structures, it left an explanation widely open
to speculation.
However, the Australian Indigenous Doctor's Association review of
health outcomes in 2010 showed it could lead
to profound long term
damage — both in
health outcomes and in the trust Aboriginal people have in government agencies and policies.