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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

>The 80-year-old white stucco home...

Well there's your problem. Old houses have lead. It should be assumed to be that way unless there's reason to believe otherwise.

It'll be another 50+yr before most lead paint is gone. The fact of the matter is that labor is expensive in this country so lead paint is rarely dealt with unless it's conveniently within the scope of other work.

I don't think this article very meaningful unless we have more data points. Is base housing more or less likely to contain lead than similiar quality housing in other cities?

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I find the revelation that the military has failed to notify state health agencies of lead poisoning as reqired by law and refused to take effective steps to prevent further poisoning after the issue was brought to their attention to be extremely meaningful and newsworthy. The cost to properly remediate lead poisoning hazards is far less than the societal costs of lead poisoning, including additional healthcare and education costs and lost future economic contributions from brain-damaged children.

Sure, but when you're talking about a military house inside a military base owned and maintained by the military you have to assume that the military bears some responsibility for it.

Just waving your hands and walking away because it's old is a bit short sighted.

I'm non sure why you are being downvoted, and in typical HN fashion no one wants to take the time to explain why.

I don't think anyone would excuse an apartment building owner for renting apartments to tenants with lead painted walls, so I'm not sure why folks here think the US Army should get a free pass...

No one is getting a free pass. The article discusses private landlords.

>I don't think this article very meaningful

It tells me that we have no idea how dangerous things we use/make are. Killing ourselves with a paint, that's a degenerate way to live.

It’s as recent as anything built before 1986 when it comes to lead pipes: https://www.epa.gov/lead/protect-your-family-exposures-lead

In the UK we had lead in petrol until the year 2000 and most motorsports was sponsored by big tobacco in those days. So worrying about a little bit of lead in paint left over from 1986 kind of shows how far we have come.

We did actually have lead free petrol before then in the UK and the government even made it significantly cheaper. But nobody wanted it, they chose to pay extra to put toxic lead in their cars. Damaging their engine bothered people more than damaging their kids brains (or even their own brains).

Luckily the UK was part of Europe and EU legislation resulted in leaded fuel being removed from forecourts.

I also find it amusing that we still call that petrol “unleaded,” as if to imply that the natural state of petrol is leaded and some company has kindly removed the lead from it to make it safer, rather than never adding it.

I don't know, "unleaded" sounds kind of like "unleavened", where leavening was never added in the first place. I think "deleaded" might be closer to "lead removed", if it were a word.

Private plane owners in the USA still burn leaded fuel! It's the source of 50% of children's lead exposure.

Gonna need to see a source on that 50%

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3230438/

The US government probably isn't subject to the same abatement and disclosure laws as regular landlords.

This is often true. There's typically "equivalent" regulations that are created by the executive branch for the executive branch. However, it's difficult to hold anybody accountable for violations, so you don't typically have any recourse like you do with a private party.

> Old houses have lead

So I’ll accept that lead pipes are not great but how bad is lead paint really?

Specifically, if you have lead paint underneath several layers of more modern titanium paint, what is the lead poisoning risk? I thought the more significant risk with lead paint was from paint flaking into dust, especially for painted iron which comes off as the iron rusts.

Lead paint that has been covered in layers of latex paint is safe.

Most of the hazard of lead paint comes from kids eating paint chips in poorly maintained buildings or contractors sanding it off and contaminating the building.

Also, lead paint tastes sweet, so leaded paint chips are extremely appealing for small children to eat.

> Old houses have lead. It should be assumed to be that way unless there's reason to believe otherwise.

Lead paint was more expensive (it was whiter), so buy an old house that was cheap for its time :)

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