America’s Misguided War on Childhood Lead Exposures | Hacker News Reader

America’s Misguided War on Childhood Lead Exposures

undark.org

35 pointsanarbadalov27 comments

For anyone mislead by the headline, the misguided bit is the way the war on childhood lead exposure is being conducted, not the war itself.

Everyone knows where the biggest problems are. There are whole neighborhoods of older housing with peeling lead paint. In many cases honest cost-benefit analysis would say it is cheaper in the long run to tear out/tear down/semipermanently seal up the hazardous buildings. The society costs in medical, prison, and assistance over the lifetime of the poisoned children are less than the cost to fix the root cause.

So why don't we have a giant lead paint superfund tearing down or safely refurbishing the hazardous housing before it debilitates more kids?

I think the major issue is perceived fairness. Government paying owners to tear down or refurbish housing would look like an unfair give-away to the owners. Requiring all owners to abate lead hazards without payment looks like an unfair take-away from owners.

Paying for families to live in safe housing looks like an unfair give-away to the families. (How to make it fair for the families who would have never considered living an unsafe place vs the ones who considered it and are now paid to live elsewhere?)

And neither the owners of unsafe properties nor the families living there are groups with much political clout.

I guess in a few more decades the fraction of remaining housing stock with lead hazards may become small enough that it becomes politically feasible to address the problem directly. Until then, more of the half-hearted effoet that addresses problems on a case-by-case basis only after kids are permanently impaired.

Another similar epidemic to lead poisoning we've been sleeping on is lithium deficiency. Look at the quantum of improvement on suicide and all kinds of violent crime, including rape and murder per this study[1]. Image of results table:

https://imgur.com/p6p886e

It's hard not to conclude that it's immoral to not chuck lithium in the water supply, if the natural variance is associated with a doubling of murder. The study has been replicated on suicide in Japan[2] and on Dementia in Denmark[3].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1699579

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19407280

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28832877

We don't even know that lithium deficiency is definitively a thing, it's not like there's an established RDA. There could be any number of reasons why it's correlated with lower violent crime.

Lithium is prescribed in bipolar disorder, wouldn't that imply it is reasonably understood?

"Reasonably understood" is not the same as "Oh, hey, this seems to work."

> It's hard not to conclude that it's immoral to not chuck lithium in the water supply

It took me a while to decipher that quadruple negation. In conclusion we should consider chucking lithium in the water supply.

> Owners can simply claim they’re unaware of lead paint on the property, and in most cases, that’s the box they check on the disclosure form because lead inspections occur so rarely,

This needs to change. There needs to be a duty on the seller to investigate and declare, certified by a certified third party for lead. Same for other contaminants. A number of other nasty environmental stingers can be non-declared as well, unfortunately. Disgusting.

Anyway - the entirety of the lead paint housing stock needs to be remediated, along with the ground near it. Too, the old highways and roads need to have a remediation plan implemented.

This is one of the Great Challenges for the next 100 years. Not as sexy as going to Mars, but we will reap dividend after dividend in public health. The EPA and the SuperFund system need to be supercharged; we will have boons of public health paying back year after year here.

edit: you can find information about it all over when you start looking. Here's a fast explainer - https://www.vox.com/2016/1/19/10790534/lead-soil

Unfortunately the EPA is working hard on going the other way at the moment. I don't care that much about anything else Trump does but cutting on environmental protection is truly evil in my view and will damage the country for a long time.

Researchers discovering problems? No worries, fire all the researchers!

Yes, I'm very bummed about the EPA direction. It's part and parcel of the general GOP plan, which is to roll back the Great Society, New Deal, and Progressive Era policies. Very bad for the country on many axes.

My grandmother delivered her first child several months early after inhaling the fumes of a fresh coat of leaded paint. My uncle died not long after being born. He was resuscitated, but not before the lack of oxygen to the brain caused permanent damage, including blindness and developmental disorders. He has lived in some very, very bad places that were supposed to be helpful to people like him but turned out to be so nightmareish that I wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemies. He is in a better home now. He’s over 60. I don’t think he has ever recognized my mother, but he seems to enjoy the ice cream she brings him when she visits.

Is the new CDC limit too low? Does it matter? All I can offer is an anecdotal story of terrible sadness for many people. For that reason, I always take lead exposure seriously. There is no safe limit.

Was lead exposure ruled the cause of the early delivery?

I'm all for eliminating environmental pollutants, but let's encourage it using things less trivial to dismiss.

Edit: rereading this, it sounds harsh. I can't, offhand, think of a good way to soften it, so I'll say this: I appreciate you sharing your story and empathize with the difficulty of the lives of the people involved. I want more people to understand and internalize the need to reduce needless pollutants (safe or not, because the trend seems to usually be we think it's safe and then we find out it's not). People who don't already care or want to dismiss this issue will ignore anecdotes. If a doctor said that lead was the cause, it ceases to be what I'd consider an anecdote and it's harder to ignore.

You are right, though. Lead paint doesn't emit lead vapors (except if you remove it with those heat gun things)

That's a terrible story. I am so sorry for what your uncle has had to suffer.

I think there is a safe limit. When I did a number of shooting sports I got myself tested. I was absolutely fine, despite almost certainly inhaling small amounts of leads, and definitely handling lead.

I have only met one person in the shooting sports/shooting industry who was diagnosed with lead poisoning, a young woman who worked at a gun store/range.

Many people who I shot with would have had far greater exposure than me and also got themselves tested.

The counter argument is that lead poisoning has such a wide range of symptoms it can be misdiagnoses.

>...I think there is a safe limit.

For adults.

For children and their brain development, the safe level is zero.

There is no safe limit. Smaller exposures may not be testable and the damage isn't obvious, but there's still damage, and it is cumulative.

Lead, mercury, fluoride. Other cumulative neurotoxins. It seems obvious to me that we should work to eliminate anything which damages our brains, whether or not we can test yet for effects.

Fluoride? Please explain how that damages the human brain.

Fluoride is a foreign substance which is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice.

Are you making a Dr Strangelove joke or actually serious?

"It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? ... That's the way a hard-core commie works." (It's a near direct quote from the film.)

I'm hoping the phrase "precious bodily fluids" makes it obvious.

"Some research has suggested that high levels of fluoride exposure may adversely affect neurodevelopment in children, but the evidence is of insufficient quality to allow any firm conclusions to be drawn."[1]

Even though the research on the effects on the brain is inconclusive, you probably should avoid ingesting too much fluoride to avoid skeletal fluorosis. And if you take a large dose of several grams, it drains your blood of calcium, which the nervous system really doesn't like.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoride_toxicity#Brain

It is interesting how those that disagree that man causes climate change are martinalized due to “scientific consensus” but when an even more overwhelming consensus exists around fluoridation, you have counties banning fluoridation without much public outcry.

Netherlands, Japan, USSR/Russia, among others have stopped water fluoridation[1]. US Doctors, in my experience, want to ensure you drink fluoridated water, on the other hand (drink tap water!)

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_controversy

I'd rather not try -- there's scientific controversy and the explanations on both sides (that I've seen) are low quality. So people are reduced to 'weighing evidence', which is irrational.

Part of the problem of course is politics. Dental health and vaccination are both very important good things and this makes it even harder to determine the truth of the matter. For example, people regularly exclaim things like 'there's absolutely no evidence that X', or 'there's overwhelming evidence that Y'. But they do this rhetorically, and as I said, without associated explanations. In such circumstances 'evidence' isn't always meaningful.

Hence my original point. Since we don't yet understand how the brain and the mind work (if we did, we'd have AGI) we're not in a position to assess damaging effects, if any, which may be subtle. If this was any other organ, I'd say let it go. But the brain is the seat of the mind and is therefore uniquely precious.

"fluoride"?

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