Not sure if you caught this in consideration of the issue as it pertains to brass mouthpieces:
I'm only asking in regard to whether or not refacing could be considered a "cutting operation" (not setting forther whether it is or isn't), as perhaps you're better familiar with that term of art.
There is nothing new there, For the sake of argument, in a mouthpiece context it presupposes that:
A: Chinese brass is any different to western brass
B: That you have acidic spit
C: That you are sucking in your spit and ingesting the lead content, rather than blowing through the mouthpiece
D: That any plating is missing in action.
That study was with respect to the plumbing fixtures in your home. Last I checked they are still all made of brass with more or less the same composition (including the lead globules and smearing at the machined surfaces), and unlike a sax mouthpiece you are actually ingesting the fluid passing those surfaces, rather than blowing it down the horn and away from you.
A quick glance at the results of that study seems to show that in the worst case example the median lead content of the initial water samples was found to be about 0.5ppm. After in excess of 100 days of exposure to brass it was up to about 10ppm (compared to several hundred for a pure lead sample). Higher lead content brasses (red brass) had a correspondingly higher leach rate.
The full study is here by the way:
http://www.epa.gov/nrmrl/pubs/600r96103/600R96103.pdf
If you care to wade through it there is also reference to "stagnation time", which means that the worst of any leaching occurs after a number of hours of exposure to the leaching liquid, which does not quite tally with the way I play the sax, so I suspect the real world dangers are minimal.
I dunno about you, but I dont intend to suck on my mouthpiece for days at a time, although people that have heard me play may argue that I've sucked for years (but mostly on hard rubber)