Health effects of coexistence between atmospheric particulate matter and microbial have received more and more attention. In this paper, quartz and lead in atmospheric particles were used as the object to prepare silica dust with lead, which has different concentrations. The dust concentration was 16 g·L-1. All the work is to explore the mechanism of lead coated onto high-silica dust on cell wall/membrane injury of Escherichia coli. MTT (thiazolyl blue) was used to determine the cell viability of microbes. Compared with the control group, the cell viability of lead ion group was higher than that of the group of lead coated onto quartz dust after E. coli was treated for 2 h, it also presented a Dose effect. In PI intake test, it showed that intensity in the high concentration lead dust group was 36% and 46% higher than that in the control group, and intensity in the heavy metal group was the same as that in the former. For the Confocal laser scanning microscope, the results showed that the red fluorescence intensity of the experiment group was significantly higher than that of the control group, suggesting that the permeability of the cell membrane of the bacteria has obviously increased after treated with Pb coated onto quartz dust. The fluorescence intensity measured by fluorescence spectrophotometry showed that the intensity of ROS in the solution and cell both increased. Pb coated onto quartz dust group (Q + Pb-2, Q + Pb-3) were twice and 2.5 times higher than those in the control group, respectively. According to the previous study, the change of ROS in the solution is mainly determined by the amount of the binding state of heavy metal ions on the quartz surface. On the basis of above phenomenon, we found that Reactive Oxygen Species play an important role in inducing cell membrane damage. In the infrared characterization, the effects of Pb and Pb coated onto quartz dust on E. coli surface groups mainly attach importance to phosphodiester group, protein methylation and the amide band of the cell membrane. Those groups showed a significant peak shift after reacted with quartz dust, and all of them showed a strong combination with each other. In summary, the heavy metal and dust together changed the cell membrane permeability, destroyed the integrity of cell membrane gradually, and then affected cell viability, ultimately, the interaction lead to bacterial death. We infer that ROS, heavy metals caused damage to the cell membrane, which might be an vital toxic mechanism of Pb coated onto quartz dust.