In 2023, the children’s food company WanaBana recalled its fruit puree and cinnamon apple sauce due to exceptionally high levels of lead contamination. Hundreds of kids across the country were identified as having consumed the products. The FDA eventually determined that the cinnamon was likely intentionally adulterated with lead chromate to enhance its color and/or increase its weight.
Lead poisoning in children can damage the nervous system, slow growth and development and lead to learning and behavioral problems. It’s linked to poor impulse control, attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorders, hearing and speech problems, anemia and seizures—all irreversible effects.
The first cluster of children impacted by the WanaBana recall—22 children in all—was identified in North Carolina.
At the time, registered nurse Ashley Stacy-Boddapati, MPH ’25, was conducting clinical research at Syneos Health. She also happened to be a Brown graduate student building her Online MPH practicum. The practicum is an anchor of Brown’s MPH program and gives students hands-on experience addressing real-world public health issues.
Stacy-Boddapati decided to focus her practicum on lead levels in spices and other often-overlooked sources. She discovered lead was present in spices, ceremonial powders and other products commonly used throughout the growing South Asian and Middle Eastern communities of North Carolina.
This work led her to co-found the Clean Spice Initiative—a grass-roots enterprise grounded in clinical and community ties, with the goal of tackling lead poisoning in North Carolina. Her key collaborators are Drs. Deepthi Gowrishankar and Maniraj Jeyaraju, two primary care physicians. They meet every month and work to raise awareness through community and clinical outreach.
Today, Stacy-Boddapati is the statewide nurse consultant to the North Carolina Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. Her founding of the Clean Spice Initiative—along with her work as a nurse, researcher and public health specialist—has earned her the inaugural Emerging Leader Award from Brown’s School of Public Health. The award honors a recent graduate of the School of Public Health whose work exemplifies one or more of the school’s values: excellence, equity, diversity and inclusion, collaboration, innovation and community focus.
We spoke with Stacy-Boddapati about her efforts to reduce lead exposure in North Carolina and beyond.
What drew you to study childhood lead poisoning?
My clinical background is in labor and delivery and I’ve been interested in maternal and child health from the beginning of my nursing career. This work fit in naturally because in my current role I oversee childhood and prenatal lead testing.
My team is in the Children’s Environmental Health unit of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. I’m the only nurse; the rest of the team are epidemiologists and environmental health specialists. I think we would say that lead poisoning prevention found us. Once you’re in it, it hooks you, and now we’re in it for the long haul.
What’s the latest news from the Clean Spice Initiative?
We’re focusing on community outreach. We did a community survey and a clinician survey to gather baseline data and found that a lot of people are unaware of these blood exposure sources, including the clinicians who are determining whether children should be tested. There’s a lot of work to be done. We’ve delivered presentations to several groups of clinicians and we’re continuing to focus on getting the word out to people at different health systems.
We’ve set up booths at local cultural festivals and farmer’s markets in North Carolina and we have more planned for this year, to get out there and talk to people.
My colleague Dr. Maniraj Jeyaraju moved to Maryland recently, where he’s a practicing physician. I met virtually with him and some experts to see how he can build community there, and how we can forge partnerships between Maryland and North Carolina, through data sharing and other activities.
