Half of American kids have lead in their blood, doctors say
futurism.com
futurism.com
I personally have used both XRF and swabs on various objects around by home, and I found some really scary shit. The scariest were the older Lenox dishes we used for years; the decorative glaze on the eating surface tested high in lead via XRF, and the swab lit up bright red which means that lead was also coming off in our food.
I threw away all our dishes and bought new Corelle.
Other problems I found include old electrical cords and things made out of brass, including all plumbing fittings made before about 2012. These will also turn a swab red, especially if there's any corrosion, which means the lead is mobile.
I looked up on Snopes -- they didn't seem to be too convinced that she's legit[0]. Some more googling didn't seem to show any reputable site repeating her claims.
It's hard to tell if any of this is true or not. (Especially since there's a difference between a _cracked_ or chipped plate vs a normal one)
[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vintage-pyrex-contains-uns...
Notice that the article doesn't provide one single piece of evidence of its own. Kim offers only a contorted narrative about FDA regulations and manufacturer denials, and complains about being unable to find "alternative sources". But the widespread use of lead pigments in ceramic glazes and paints is so well known, and so easily verified, that this is a bit like complaining about alternative sources for the color of the sky.
Tamara's XRF results can be easily verified by anyone with access to an XRF machine. You can take your dishes to any county health department and have them tested by XRF, and you'll see similar numbers. This is what I did with my old Lenox dishes, and the XRF revealed over 5000 ppm lead in the surface glaze. I've had dozens of pieces tested this way, including pyrex, corningware, radom kids cups, etc, and the numbers I get match Tamara's. And of course they do. It would be stupid for anyone to fabrinate this data, because it's so easy to verify.
Anyone can buy a LeadCheck swab for a buck or two and test for mobile lead at the surface. This is mostly how I test the stuff in my house, and it's how I know that my contaminated dishes were an actual poisoning hazard. If the lead comes off on a swab, then it will come off on your hands, in your food, and in your baby's mouth.
It's a similar story with cords and brass plumbing fittings. The facts of lead-based heat stabilizers used in PVC cable jackets, and the high lead content of traditional water works brass, are as incontrovertable as the sky is blue.
Kim LaCapria at Snopes doesn't seem to understand any of this. There's no indication that she even knows what XRF is, or how widely available these devices are.
But if I had an XRF tester I would use it all the time. The swabs are relatively slow, especially the way I use them, and they don't work at all for some things. For example, a swab won't tell you if there's lead paint under a layer of safe paint. This is important because that lead paint is just as much of a hazard when it chips or when you do any remodelling. You can scrape away paint a layer at a time to swab it, but you'll never get a whole house tested this way, whereas an XRF could do it in an hour or two.
Every so often I gather up some particular things and take them to the tri-county health department here in south Denver for XRF testing. The last batch I took included some old red-painted hand tools, a chip of red paint from a yard decoration, a set of chinese-made pastel crayons that my kids got for christmas, and a bag of dust I collected from the HVAC in our house. These things aren't testable with swabs; the dust isn't swabable, and the red tools and pastels colored the swab regardless of lead content.
The people there are friendly and eager to help. I made an appointment, and the lady actually drove in for it from a different department. She tested all my stuff in about 15 minutes, and everything came back negative except for one of the red tools. Even the chinese-made pastels were completely clean, which surprised me.
Fun bonus: she told me a story about how the county health department updated their standard household lead testing protocol twelve years ago after some guy brought in a bunch of dishes that tested shockingly high. Guess who that guy was? :)
I felt like I was going to throw up, knowing that I'd been feeding my kids off those dishes for years. I've had to really work at putting that burden down and moving on. I never had my kids blood tested, and they seem fine, but I've love it if my experience helps someone else avoid the danger.
I remember begging my grandmother to stop using her cheap boil-in coffee pot. Cheap glaze wore down, then the paint, then the metal of the pot. Aluminum just leeching into all the coffee.
Didn't matter, she loved the flavor. The replacements I got her were used once because she loved me, then relegated to the cupboard.
She had really bad alzheimer's by the end. I'll never know if any of the cheap dishes and pits/pans('teflon' coatings etc), but it's always made me super paranoid about this stuff, I bought some testing kits tonight after reading all this.
I assume glass is just lead-free by default and I don't need to go out looking for a special lead-free version of glassware, right?
So, by default, "glass" is indeed lead-free, unless you're talking about some fancy older glassware.
Stuff like leaded fuel exhaust or paint flakes are more likely to be ingested/absorbed.
Using electrical cords as an example, years ago I went through my house and swabbed all of the cords. If I found a cord that turned a swab red, I either threw the thing away if it was cheap, like an old coffee grinder, or I replaced the cord if I didn't want to replace the whole machine, like the cords on all of our Oreck vacuum cleaners.
A lot of newer cords have lead in the insulation as indicated by XRF, but won't turn a swab pink. These I don't worry about too much, but I still tell the kids to wash their hand after handling them.
EDIT:
The LeadCheck swabs are pretty expensive, and using a whole swab for just one or two objects is ridiculously wasteful, but I have a trick that makes them cheap. I cut the cotton head off of a Q-tip cosmetic swab so that it's just a rolled paper rod. I activate the LeadCheck swab and squeeze out a drop of the liquid onto the upright surface of the swab. I dab the end of the decapitated Q-tip in the liquid, and I use that to swab the surface of whatever I'm testing. If something turns the paper red, I clip the end of the shaft off with nail clippers to get a fresh end, and continue to the next object.
I can get dozens of tests out of a single swab this way. I make a list of things to test in one afternoon, and I can get the whole pile done for the cost of a single swab, instead of spending hundreds of dollars it would take to use a new LeadCheck swab for each object.
Plus, the hard paper Q-tip shaft works better for aggressively rubbing on surfaces.
So how much mass does a toy or a dish lose and how much of it ends up in somebody's mouth?
Based on the data above if you ate 10g of your 5000ppm dish that seems equivalent to 5kg of carrots. And I do love to make a carrot juice, that's like a few servings. 10g of dish seems like a lot to swallow.
I'm just trying to explain my lack of understanding here. I have just learned about these measurements and I'm clueless about the topic.
1. https://www.scielo.br/j/hb/a/PSXVNhx63TkLq9rFKVFNfjr/?lang=e...
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/016788...
Kids chew on and swallow all kinds of weird shit. I've seen young kids chew the paint off whole sets of pencils. Babies put literally everything they can in their mouth. I've watched children lick window sills for fucks sake.
If there's lead glaze on the eating surface of a plate or bowl, and if you know it's mobile, as it was on my dishes, then it's a safe assumption that it's mostly going in your food.
Someone could spend a ton of time and money studying and quantifying the transfer of lead in all kinds of different scenarios, but what would the purpose be, when it's a relatively simple matter to abate or remove the hazard completely?
Food is a different matter, and I believe tested regulation of heavy metals in foods is sorrowfully lacking.
I'm just not sold on the idea of testing/researching products and getting rid of them based on what I've learned these last 10 minutes. It seems to me that it would be multiple orders of magnitude more important to test your vegetables if you are a lead-minimizer?
And what about soil? E.g. in context of playgrounds. Soil is 15-40ppm Pb. Really bad toy from 90s is 5000ppm. Exposure surface * time * ppm. Based on that equation it seems that testing playground soil would be much more important.
Assuming your lead-heavy plate completely disappears after 10 years of every day usage just ponder how much of it ended up in your belly compared to dishwasher cycles. If 1% of it disappeared, and you ate 1% of what dishwasher did, then it's equivalent to eating the dish weight of carrots during these 10 years.
I have no idea why I'm defending leaded dishware here, I do not recommend anybody keep their leaded anything based on erroneous math and data from some random HN comment. I would just like to learn if there is something I'm missing that would change my understanding of the problem.
Lead dust in houses is a well studied hazard. The folks at the county department tell me the things they address first are lead paint (interior and exterior house paint and soil around the house), lead in the tap water, and vinyl mini-blinds. Abating those sources almost always drops BLL in the kids. If that isn't enough, they go after toys and dishes. If I remember right, testing of food is not yet in their protocol.
For me the decision to get rid of the dishes was trivially simple. I'd be glad to find out that the food we ate off those dishes miraculously failed to pick up any of the lead that so easily rubbed off on my swabs. I don't think that's likely.
Same with the kids toys and art supplies. Sure, I can tell little kids not to lick their arylics, but why wouldn't I also make sure the yellows are cadmium-free, just in case they forget and eat a sandwich with paint on their fingers?
Honestly, the amount of lead in dishes and crystal (when it even contains it) is low. If you keep the contact time with the food low and there's no cracks/chips/dust, then you're fine. As an example, generally drinking from crystal is fine, but leaving a drink in a crystal decanter is not.
> The biggest reason is that essentially Chicago and other cities around Illinois required the use of lead service lines all the way until 1986, long after it was recognized that lead was poisonous and other cities had stopped using it. A decade after other cities had stopped using it Chicago and other cities in Illinois were not only using it but requiring the use of lead long after everybody else.
[0] https://news.wttw.com/2021/03/24/chicago-has-more-lead-servi...
On the surface, finally after a decade-long fight, the plumber's union, despite objections by its union spokespeople, said in 1986 it would defer to the city council after the matter was decided at the federal level, but in that decade, long after other cities had banned lead pipes, lead pipes were still a required part of Chicago building code.
https://www.npr.org/local/309/2020/09/11/911903152/here-s-ma...
Unions are constantly doing evil things, usually for the same greedy and power-hungry reasons as any corporate board, and to the same detriment of society at large, but because we think of unions as being on "our side" and latch onto this romanticized notion of the unions of the 1800s they get a pass.
The police and prison guard unions constantly do horrible things to increase incarceration rates, erode civil rights and remove accountability. Labor unions fight against improvements that would make their industries pollute less if it makes their jobs harder or would replace union-dues-paying members with technology or non-union jobs. And they constantly create artificial monopolies and cartels far worse than any of the corporate behavior, which create situations like the pilot unions where senior pilots get huge salaries and cushy routes while entry-level pilots are treated like slaves, or where you're not allowed to plug in your laptop charger to a wall outlet because only a union electrician can touch it.
I wish society was better at recognizing "this group is harming society for the benefit of themselves" can be applied everywhere- corporations, unions, branches of government, etc
In terms of overall welfare, an additional dollar in the pocket of a typical union worker is going to be more welfare enhancing than that additional dollar in the pocket of the typical owner. This is from just basic diminishing marginal utility of the dollar.
Of course, unions can do awful, evil things - they are organizations of people and people are petty, self-centered, greedy, etc.
I'm in favor of workers' ability to elect someone to represent them at the negotiation table (because that is what a union is). I'm not unaware that sometimes those workers can elect bad people.
I'm also in favor of electoral democracy, even if I wouldn't personally defend every single person who has been elected president since the start of time.
To reiterate, I would support voters being able to decide military policy, even if the alternative was a peaceful oligarchy.
Your second paragraph adds nothing except detailing your reasoning which only serves to exemplify the behavior the comment you are replying to is complaining about. The point of the comment you are replying to is that people have a bad tendency to ignore groups doing evil things for their own gains if they otherwise align with these groups.
Whether it's the moron on one side of the isle screeching about "mUh UnIoNs" or the moron on the other side of the isle screeching about "mUh SmAlL bUsInEsSeS" is irrelevant. People, you very much included, need to refrain from giving groups on "their side" a blank check to engage in evil self serving behavior at everyone else's expense.
Of course the evil to good ratio is not the same for any two groups or groups of groups. His entire point was that that liking one group more than another is a worthless excuse for turning a blind eye to that group's evil. Just because you are able to write a second (or 3rd or 4th) paragraph expanding about why you feel one group deserves a blind eye more than another only serves to illustrate his point.
Your behavior is exactly what he is complaining about.
Nobody in this thread was "screeching" about anything, and I don't appreciate being not-so-subtly called a moron. I have done nothing of the same to you.
I am perfectly capable of criticizing bad actions by unions, 2020 has had a number of them.
But I will not use those critiques as an excuse to argue that the right to elect someone to negotiate on your behalf should be curtailed, because I believe the right to worker self-determination comes prior to those consequences - just as I don't support banning "bad" speech even if that speech has consequences.
I'm not going to keep responding because, honestly, you seem to be shadow-boxing a conversational opponent who only exists in your own mind.
Remarkably few people seem to truly understand what "marginal propensity to consume" actually means.
Economically, money saved is money lost. Money invested is a promise of debt. Consumption is what drives the economy. That's why the poor and middle class are so important. Without them having enough money, the economics of scale... don't scale.
I do understand that the rich aren't gong to spend as much as the middle and lower classes, but I don't have a good answer for the predictable trickle-down rebuttal: the wealthy will invest rather than spend, and that investment funds jobs which put money in the pockets of the poor (but perhaps more so in the pockets of the rich?). You sort of touch on that: "consumption is what drives the economy", but I think the trickle-down economics folks would agree and argue that their job-creation-via-investment results in increased consumption? I have a headache.
It's probably more true now than during most of history, but it's not always true.
It probably was true in the Reagan era that trickle-down "worked", because there was a lot of opportunity for large scale capital investment to improve the economy and make things people wanted (and provide jobs in the process). That doesn't seem as true now. Investors already have an excess amount of capital they don't know what to do with (and so are just doing things like buying houses en masse).
It has the added benefit of bidding up the price of things poor people need, which yes is inflationary but also incentivizes more resources being provisioned to help provide the things that poor people need.
> In terms of overall welfare
What is overall welfare ? If you are talking about society then we already know that free market competition leads to the best outcomes. If you are talking about welfare of specific group of people (at the expense of others) then you are right.
> I'm in favor of workers' ability to elect someone to represent them at the negotiation table (because that is what a union is).
I do not think anyone is opposed to that idea. It is covered under our freedom to form association. But in many cases unions are exact opposite of this. There is only one union which will negotiate on your behalf whether you like it or not and will actively prevent you from selecting someone else to negotiate on your behalf. In such cases workers are less free than before and it is much easier for the employer to get their way by just bribing the union leaders. (This is what happens in every single society where unions have collective bargaining rights.)
Who's “we”? I was under the impression that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure was accurate.
Employment is one of the most obvious, salient examples of market failure I can think of. Exploitative employers engineer situations where employees can't even use the job market, because they need a job and job-shopping (e.g. taking time off-call to do interviews) will lose them their job. Example: Arise Virtual Solutions[0].
If that's not a good enough example? See the gig economy. Companies taking over a service sector “with an app”, at a loss (using investor money), then squeezing the money back out of employees (e.g. by misclassifying them, not telling them how much each gig pays, programming virtual micromanagers to work them to the point of health problems in the name of “efficiency”). To use your words:
> If you are talking about welfare of specific group of people (at the expense of others) then you are right.
[0]: https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#ari...
It's easy to find lump sum transfers that would be welfare enhancing over the pareto optimal outcome decided by the market.
> There is only one union which will negotiate on your behalf whether you like it or not and will actively prevent you from selecting someone else to negotiate on your behalf.
Well yes, you are beholden to the results of the election - even if the side you voted for didn't win. That is what worker self-determination is all about.
> it is much easier for the employer to get their way by just bribing the union leaders
Then why don't employers bring in unions more often?
Maybe, but printing a dollar and giving it to a union worker causes worse inflation than printing a dollar and giving it to an owner.
There is no argument that employees should have the right to form an association. The problems arise when such associations get "special privileges" that an average worker does not. Both L and R talk a lot about "equality of law" but happily shred that principle when it comes to their own voter groups.
Nearly all the evil (as you describe it) caused by unions is eventually due to the collective bargaining rights and other privileges.
In the words of Milton Friedman, unions do not protect workers. The competition protects workers. Market competition is the biggest rival to unions and hence unions will go to extreme lengths to prevent this sort of competition to keep themselves relevant. This does immense harm to workers as well as society in the long term. Folks like me who have seen extreme violence unleashed by workers unions end up despising very notion of unions for the same reason.
Be it through negotiating salaries or restricting the number of doctors or enforcing very difficult admission procedures for lawyers.
They tend to also effect other, non-zero-sum game advantages, or otherwise they would probably be outlawed, but this is the gist of it. You can still acknowledge that many were founded with good intentions, but people who do not see at least some downsides have a severe reasoning defect.
We went through the exercise a few years ago. It can be difficult to find a plumbing service willing to do this kind of work because not only do they need a special certification (makes sense) but the company has to put up something like a $5000 bond on their work with the city.
On top of that replacing the portion of the line that goes from the shutoff to the main requires digging up the street, so it can only be done if your street is not currently on a "moratorium" because it was recently repaved. Finally, the city charges a significant amount in permitting fees before you even get to paying for the plumbing service, roadwork repair and landscaping.
We finally gave up on that project and given the relatively low level leeching into our water just decided that we could live with using water filters specifically designed to remove lead for any water that our kids drink / cook with.
If Chicago was really serious about tackling this they could start with waiving permitting fees and bond requirements and streamline the process for managing the part of the process that occurs on city property. That'd at least make replacing these more tractable during a remodel.
This was my first thought as well, then I remembered Chicago.
As someone else pointed out, Chicago has made some changes here - and they plan to eventually remove all service lines. That said - this is Chicago. The mayor had a goal to remove 650 lines this year and there was a story in the Chicago Tribune recently that so far that number is ... 3. For context there are ~400k lines to replace.
[1] https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/BillStatus.asp?DocNum=3739&...
I'd suggest that the Union that voted to keep the lead as a requirement pay. /evilgrin
Obviously there are confounders, but Kevin Drum’s decade old article positing that lead was a major contributor to the crime wave and subsequent reduction is pretty compelling. [1]
EDIT: aside, but maybe one of the most depressing things I’ve ever learned is the high levels of lead in the ink used to wrap various Mexican candy. [2] and this 2014 article [3] on lead levels in Mexican kids where the mean levels exceed the upper acceptable level in the US.
There are few things that cause me more distress than the failure to comprehensively tackle this issue worldwide.
[0] https://chicagohealthatlas.org/indicators/lead-poisoning
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...
[2] https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-2004-05-14-04051...
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25459328/
“Our results indicate that more than 15% of the population will experience a decrement of more than 5 IQ points from lead exposure. The analysis also leads us to believe that lead is responsible for 820,000 disability-adjusted life-years for lead-induced mild mental retardation for children aged 0 to 4 years.”
This makes the assumption that poorness and crime are correlated, which I recently learned is not a universal truth.
Two variables can be correlated, without being a universal truth.
https://annalsofglobalhealth.org/articles/10.5334/aogh.2754/
None of them suffer from this problem. Almost all of the charts aren't even density maps, and of the two that are, they are charting family income vs. soil lead level, which wouldn't suffer from the problem mentioned in the comic.
High concentration chlorine (and flouride, where used) were reactive to contaminants such that they were often chemically/ electrically attracted to the lead pipes (clay soil and other environmental factors played a role), and the pipes leeched contaminants from the water. Lower concentrations of chlorine and any concentration of most chlorine-alternatives not only allow water to leech from the lead pipes, but it also can reverse the previous process, such that decades of leeched chemicals and contaminants deposited in/on the lead (and other) pipes are released back into the water, at a much higher rate and concentration.
Washington DC went through this issue [0] in what was a huge public embarrassment, at least within the civil engineering community. It left the EPA with a black eye in what was supposed to be a landmark and example-setting project.
Now that it's known to happen, better precautions can be taken, but it's absolutely still an issue, especially in places like Detroit, where the surviving lead pipes were largely the service lines on the user side of the water meter. (Remediation and upgrades to water distribution systems often stops at the meter, including design considerations.)
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_contamination_in_Washingt...
I still have the 7" (18cm) section of pipe they removed -- it's an impressively heavy, several pounds at least. There is an absolutely seriously huge amount of lead in just about everyone's yards here in Chicago, in the form of pipes.
What's less clear is how much of that lead winds up in bodies, to what resulting health impact. People need help making judgements about relative risk -- sadly, the article is not helpful in that regard.
- Paint: lead was banned in paint in 1979, but lead was used less and less even before the cutoff date. Paint is especially a problem when it is chipping or wearing off, like on windows or doors.
- Plumbing. Very old homes may have lead pipes which should be removed. Lead solder was used with copper pipes until ~1984, but this is somewhat less of a concern, depending on your water source (cities can change the water to leach less lead from pipes).
- Plumbing fixtures: this is actually a pretty major source of lead in water, and luckily it is easy to change old faucets. You can run water for a minute to mitigate risk with old faucets.
- Flooring: Lead can be in any ceramic tiles, but generally not too much. It is only a problem if you are removing tiles and are creating lots of dust.
"We got Acme's new Lead-free plumbing!"
"Lead-free plumbing? As in no lead?"
"Well 8 percent... rather a lot really..."
My layperson expectations:
• "low-X": < 1/3 is X.
• "trace amounts of X": <1% is X.
• "X-free": no reasonably detectable amount is X. Obviously there's some wiggle room for how sensitive the detectors are, but it should be less that "trace amounts," i.e. 0%.
This reminds me of "waterproof" which generally just means it can survive being splashed or rained on for a few minutes, but not submerged.
https://ecology.wa.gov/Spills-Cleanup/Contamination-cleanup/...
https://apps.ecology.wa.gov/dirtalert/?lat=47.349229&lon=-12... (not exactly a circle due to the topography and wind patterns of the area)
The point is, there was a lot of nasty industrial activity in this country pre Clean Air Act. Everyone should be concerned and get their property tested IMO, especially if you have kids. I'm not trying to be alarmist; it doesn't affect my day to day life, it's just something to know. I still grow veggies in my garden, I just use raised beds and dirt from bags from Home Depot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory
Among other things (including a nuclear meltdown):
> On 11 December 2002, a Department of Energy (DOE) official, Mike Lopez, described typical clean-up procedures executed by Field Lab employees in the past. Workers would dispose of barrels filled with highly toxic waste by shooting the barrels with rifles so that they would explode and release their contents into the air. It is unclear when this process ended, but for certain did end prior to the 1990s.[29]
Trying to get it cleaned up has been a shitshow.
And I totally wonder whether people are growing food there, soaking all of that up.
I just found that the University of New Hampshire offers a similar test with an additional heavy metals package available which covers cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, nickel & zinc: https://extension.unh.edu/resource/soil-testing-forms
(EDTA is also used medically for heavy metal poisoning).
Anecdotally, we had a major city water line project in our neighborhood that _raised_ our lead levels because it disturbed that sediment protection.
The only real solution is testing and filtering at point of use. But even filtering is hard because most water filters sold are for flavor not for lead.
To be clear: I'm not saying the burden of cost should be solely put on renters/homeowners.
I did work in a lab back in the day where one of the students was filling his water bottle from the DI tap, because he preferred the taste. He didn't drop dead or anything.
I clearly have just enough of the details to not understand.
https://scotchaddict.com/are-leaded-crystal-decanters-danger...
https://www.homedepot.com/p/3M-LeadCheck-Instant-Lead-Test-S... (this actually seems expensive, I'm used to closer to $2-3 per stick)
We have an early 20th century house and run them over anything we're about to demo. So far we've been lucky, so likely a later renovation removed most of the lead that would have been there.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/lead-poisonin...
I found out my drinking water had low levels of lead, for about ten years.
The answer to your second question is yes, handling cords with heavily leaded insulation can cause significant amounts of lead to rub off on your hands. This is easily seen with a Lead-Check swab, which will turn red when wiped either on the cord, or even on your fingers after you've spent some time handling the cord.
Just an aside, this is a personal gripe. I grew up on lead solder, making Heathkit projects with my dad.
I tried re-engaging with the electronics hobby as an adult, decades later, in a world filled with ROHS solder, and I have to say it is a huge pain in the ass to work with. Adhesion, balling issues, etc, regardless of core type, flux, etc, even on nice controlled-temp Hakko stations, versus the Weller crap irons of my youth.
Maybe I'm just a grumpy old man, or maybe my memories are covered with rose glasses. But electronics seemed be more enjoyable in the lead era. And to my knowledge, my IQ did not suffer.
I suspect the opposite. I grew up eating off of lead-contaminated Lenox dishes, playing with fishing weights and mercury from broken thermostats, and other stimulating but toxic activities. I strongly suspect these things account for at least some of the attention deficit and impulse control issues I now struggle with as an adult.
I'm sure your IQ is more than adequate, but you have no way of knowing what it would be if your brain was kept cleaner in your youth. For my part, I'd love to be smarter.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/kester-solder/24-...
Here's half a kilo of lead in a solid metal bar, if you want to just poison a whole city or small country:
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/kester-solder/44-...
Still I agree, the risk is acceptable for the small amount of solder work I do.
Which essentially means its normal for everyone except some people born in the last 20-30 years.
In the atmosphere, sure (as it is not naturally occurring in the air). But how large is this source? And what harm does it actually cause?
There are indications that the levels of lead around airports are very low - even the article linked said that ~2.5% of children around the airport had "detectable" levels of lead. But it doesn't provide enough data to tell if the contamination came from the air. If this was significant, wouldn't many more children around the airport have high (not only detectable) levels of lead? Everyone has to breathe, but not everyone has the same contamination sources.
From Wikipedia:
> Final results from EPA's lead modeling study at the Santa Monica Airport shows off-airport levels below current 150 ng/m3 and possible future 20 ng/m3 levels.[108] Fifteen of 17 airports monitored during a year-long study in the US by the EPA have lead emissions well below the current National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for lead.[109]
To be safe, obviously we want to reduce all exposure to zero.
Avgas was changed in formulation to reduce lead.
There are alternatives to avgas - in Europe, avgas is already hard to find. Automotive gasoline conversions are available for some widely used engines. The problem is that you can't just take it to a shop and covert it - the airplane was originally certified with one engine type. If it is changed, it is no longer certified. No company is willing to eat the costs to re-certify - for the planes that are still in production. Let alone planes made by companies that no longer exist.
In the 'experimental' category, there are many types of engines that can directly burn either avgas or "mogas".
Some manufacturers, like Diamond, can use "jet fuel" (essentially, diesel) in their piston engines (as they have their own engines, based on diesel car engines). But even they will have avgas-burning versions (with Lycoming engines) for the US market.
Then you have competing agencies dragging their feet. There's the EPA, which should be issuing regulations. Then there's the FAA that needs to come up with a solution with the certification issue - they are pretty underfunded so it's unlikely they will. One agency points the finger to the other, none take action. I'm probably missing other agencies. There are alternatives in development - without a full government push, progress is slow.
Meanwhile, planes (and many helicopters) in the US keep spewing lead. Many of which provide important services.
IQ damage of any amount is extremely significant and has subtle effects on society which are difficult to economically quantify, and given that many avgas burners basically do it for fun, seems mostly unjustifiable.
As a former analytical chemist, we can detect most metals down to the parts per trillion or lower.
So the more sensitive our instruments get the “more kids have lead”.
With sufficiently sensitive testing you’d probably find lead in 100% of people.
It's possible that more sensitive instruments will allow us to eventually conclude "this small amount X of lead is safe to have ...". But it makes sense to take this seriously. We know lead is bad and we know lots of environmental exposure to lead exists.
If there's no science that says "one atom of lead anywhere in your body is bad", then saying "detectable" is meaningless.
I mean, if you said "we found a detectable number of bullets in half of children", now that would be bad.
*Another poster noted this level.
It would be meaningless on that case too.
Also meaningless is saying that 2% of the kids have a high level of lead, without saying what "high" means.
Oh, that's simple - it's defined as above the 98th percentile.
(I kid, I hope...)
But if only 2% of children have lead levels that were originally defined based on the worst 2.5%, that's a 20% reduction, so great news!?
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/prevention/blood-lead-levels.h...
Did they find a problem? An improvement? Nothing? Nobody can tell by reading it alone.
Lead exists in the environment. It would be impractical to impossible to eliminate it entirely from the blood streams of most people. However certain areas have extremely dangerous concentrations such as dirt near major roads/old buildings, water in certain areas, and lead paints.
Lead pipes are an interesting one where it is simply impractical to replace all the pipes and remove lead in old cities. Hence as long as the calcification holds there is no action on the small amount of lead which leaks into the pipes.
What we really want to know is: how big of a deal is this really?
We used to use lead based pesticides at the dawn of the 20th century, if you eat any food grown in the midwest you are exposing yourself to reasonably large quantities of lead.
The problem is that pipe ownership in a domestic home is the property of the homeowner, and there's no political will to do that kind of massive wealth transfer from the public coffers to the improved infrastructure of millions of individual properties. But while it wouldn't be inexpensive, it's on par with other expenditures the federal government makes for federal projects.
They defined these blood lead levels:
* "detectable": ≥1.0 μg/dL
* "elevated": ≥5.0 μg/dL
They found that:
* 50.5% had "detectable" levels (50.4%-50.6% for the 95% CI).
* 1.9% had "elevated" levels (1.8%-1.9% for the 95% CI [wait, how is the reported amount the same as the upper limit of the CI?]).
The paper does start out saying:
> No safe level of exposure to lead has been identified.
Which I believe to be true, though it's not the same as "no level of exposure to lead is safe". I would be interested in what levels are known to be unsafe. Is 1.0 μg/dL known to be unsafe, or just not known to be safe?
It's pretty clear we should be working to reduce lead exposure, especially in children, but it's also true that "detectable amounts" and "harmful" aren't the same thing. The former clearly varies with our technology and the other remains constant (and isn't, afaik, known to be 0).
I'm curious. If there's lead in the water, the air, the soil, the food we eat, is zero even possible? Is there a baseline "side effect of living on Earth" level, even if it's very slight?
The death rate of being human is 100%. Every five minutes there's some new paper or study letting us all know why we should be afraid of something new.
I'm not saying this particular study is necessarily scare-mongering, but good grief is it tiring to see this stuff all day every day, without any scale of risk for context.
Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27634549
My landlord has been good about offering to strip in repaint the frames, but I would rather not because I feel like all of the scraping would place even more lead chips and dust in the environment. I'd rather be diligent about cleaning and have them do that strip it after we move.
I'm of the maybe controversial opinion that there should be a program to help residential users with the costs, because the reality is that when the costs are too high (even if for good reason) many just do it wrong, and make the contamination worse.
https://www.cleveland.com/cityhall/2020/08/cleveland-city-co...
Given your misuse of the term confounding variable it makes sense.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
I live in Montreal, and found out the city pipes in my area had lead. So I've been drinking it about ten years; have bottled water now.
My understanding is that chelation is good for acute exposure but wasn't sure it's recommended for lower levels. Now do I know if this is actually something to be concerned about, at low levels in an adult.
I had the city worker do a measure without flushing: 16 ug/L
(I drink bottled water now so there's no ongoing exposure. I also can't be sure my old places had it, so it could have just been for two years that I was exposed, but likely was for ten)
I don't find anything disagreeable about the EPA refraining from spending my taxes on low impact things to appease people who just want to see a feel good message be sent.
https://sanjosespotlight.com/san-jose-airport-lead-levels-ar...
Although the absolute risk is probably small the aviation industry should have moved faster on this issue. Airplanes last longer than cars but they can't expect the status quo to be tolerated indefinitely. At some point airplane owners need to be forced to upgrade their engines, or quit flying.
It's not about the owners, at all. Airplanes already have a limit on how many hours their engines have, after that it needs to be overhauled or replaced.
It's just that, for many planes, there aren't really any options available, as other engines are not certified for their planes.
Even for the planes that _are_ certified and can be changed to use other fuels, most airports don't have them available (even "mogas", which is automotive gasoline with no ethanol, is difficult to find).
(Rec fuel is a name used in Michigan at least for ethanol free gasoline intended for use in snowmobiles and boats and such)
That is false. It is a "relief" airport precisely because it is close to SJC. That allows slower traffic to land in RHRV instead of SJC. It is a real airport. Has two runways, air traffic control and what have you. What's the threshold for a 'real airport'?
There's a lot of "phenomenally valuable" land nearby with only dirt and maybe trees growing on it. There are parks and wilderness areas. Should we turn them into businesses and houses just because real state values are up?
Without a workable (technically and legally) replacement fuel, banning 100LL was never going to be viable IMO.
I wonder how much lead this exposes me to. (I'm working on a private pilot license in a Cessna 172)
I just got my test results back, since I'm having some odd symptoms and my doctor's kinda throwing ideas at the wall. He asked, jokingly, if there was a chance anyone was trying to poison me with arsenic.
I said no, but I do a lot of soldering (like a LOT), and I make a point not to chew on my solder or wear the iron behind my ear like a pencil, but who knows whether the dust is getting absorbed or whatever. What the heck, let's check for it.
My level came back at "less than 1" µg/dl, which I guess is as far down as that particular measurement can go. So that's cool, seems my precautions are adequate.
This article shows how there is lead in Londons air despite it being removed in the 90s from fuel:
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/224474/lead-from-leaded-petr...
Yeah this was going to be my question, is where is the lead coming from? Water, toys, what else?
Having a 4 week old, seeing this concerns me so I'd love to do what I can to avoid it.
Or is that because the upper middle class types avoid airport noise like the plague leaving the housing stock around airports cheaper, older and more leaded?
The correlation between low income and lead (all known bad chemicals highly used in the past really) exposure is well studied rather than speculative.
Even after "lead pipes" were banned in the US, it was still used to join copper pipe together.
It's also in solder used in electronics, although I doubt that half of American children have a parent who regularly solders at home.
As for the concerns, if there're reasons, doctor recommened us to check the water first. There may also be free test kits from the city.
Also, out of caution, we were running the water off for some time before filling pots and doing washes, esp. in the morning.
Dust wise, there's no easy solution. The wet cleaning, mopping the floors regularly and maintaining reasonable humidity indoors would help keep dust down... but babies love to crawl.
Perhaps being outdoors more may be an option, unless it's even more polluted.
If breastfed, mama's health is equally cruicial!
Old stuff has lead, but also has a bunch of other things that are of dubious health effects.
But new stuff contains more volatiles, more fluorinated plastics, and a far wider array of newish chemicals we don't yet have good data on (nanoparticles etc.)
Overall, I'd say that unless you have a lifetime to test and research everything, it probably isn't worth making any lifestyle choices to avoid unhealthy materials, because in doing so there's a good chance you'll just switch to another. But you should ask your government to put more money into population wide health initiatives, like research into health effects of chemicals.
Except pewter. Avoid that.
But like -- wood, cast iron, earthenware, unleaded glass, natural fibers (cotton, linen, hemp), vegetable dyes: I don't see how you go wrong with those.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02697...
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/heavy...
After I discovered this I replaced all of our dishes with plain white Corelle. Corelle currently uses lead-free glaze; the plain white is just me being an absolutist.
Note that vintage Corelle and almost all other vintage cookware contains some amount of lead in the decorative glaze.
Here's a good resource for lead content in the household items your kids are likely to encounter:
The real question we should ask is whether there is substantial evidence of a negative health impact from the levels of lead that are measured.
We should want to know exactly what levels were measured in these kids and be able to plot it out. We should have some idea of the health impacts of various doses. With that we could come to more meaningful conclusions.
"Although these combined studies highlight the possibility of uptake and translocation of micro- and nanoplastics into the human body following oral and inhalation exposure, there is an overall scarcity of studies that conscientiously and systematically investigated the extent of particle translocation to different organs in relation to particle dose and particle size. Moreover, the potential health risks resulting from micro- and nanoplastics exposure, uptake and translocation is poorly investigated and is an important matter of ongoing debate."
It's always the same story. #blacklivesmatter should also become an environmental and rapid climate change movement. Most oft those paying the price, for what mostly rich white men do to our planet, are people of color.
Like what is the sensitivity of the test? If we get more sensitive tests, does that mean out target changes? Where are the limits that we see issues?
I’m surprised that the article sticks with the “no lead is good” rather than the public health level.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/prevention/blood-lead-levels.h...
The link that you posted mentions 5 migrograms per deciliter of blood, while your post mentions 5 micrograms per decaliter of blood. This is a 100 fold misstatement.
A deciliter of blood is 1/10 of a liter, while a decaliter is 10 liters. For reference, I believe that the average adult male has roughly 10L of blood, so 5 micrograms per decaliter would be 5 micrograms in the body of an adult, whereas 5 micrograms per deciliter would be probably something like 5 micrograms in a baby. I don't necessarily trust this site (https://www.healthline.com/health/how-much-blood-in-human-bo...), but it says that babies have ~75 mL (0.075L, or 0.75dL) while the average adult has 4500 - 5700 mL of blood (4.5-5.7L, or 45-57dL, or 0.45-0.57DL).
I'm also surprised that the article sticks with their "no lead is good" posture.
Toys, spices, supplements, cosmetics as well as the usual pottery, water, paint etc
> Genomsnittshalten hos svenska barn är cirka 0,05 µmol/L. Halten har sjunkit sedan Sverige förbjöd blyad bensin.
For kids average is 0.05 moles/L which should be 10 μg/L. (Note it's given per liter, not dL).
Take your pick. If exposed during childhood it results in essentially mental retardation and impulse issues. The thought is this led to more issues with crime.
This article discusses the study-
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2017/06/01/new-evide...
"White lead is a very poisonous substance, and produces the disease called painters' colic, when taken into the system in minute quantities and for a long time, so that all who have much to do with this dangerous substance, as house-painters and artists, should be extremely careful that their hands are well washed frequently, and especially before going to meals. Cisterns of lead, used for containing water, very soon become coated inside with a thin flim (sic) of sulphate of lead, this prevents the water from acting further on the lead, and the water from such cisterns is never found to be poisonous; but, if distilled water were used, it would act rapidly on the lead, corroding it, and causing a deposit in the water of white lead, which would render such water dangerous in the extreme."
Remember this book was written for the information of boys; it wasn't in a new learned research paper from the Royal Society, etc. which means that 163 years ago it was very common knowledge that lead was very toxic. So how the fuck did we get to the point where we let the likes of Thomas Midgley Jr. and Big Industry introduce tetraethyllead - leaded gasoline ca 1923 and then pollute the world for another 70 or so years? Why weren't there more stringent regulations on white lead in paints, especially during its removal (somewhat like the asbestos regulations of today)? I acknowledge that avoiding lead in paint until about the mid 20th Century would have been difficult but at least some attempt to reduce its spread much earlier than when it was removed from paint should have been undertaken.
This is the same old story with industry doing its thing and to hell with the consequences. Lead was known to be dangerous in Roman times, so was mercury and asbestos and some 2000 years later we're still cursed with the mismanagement of these dangerous substance. Moreover, it doesn't stop there, we knew cigarettes and tobacco were dangerous long before the 1950s and see the fight we had over that. ...And there are many more such examples without even having to look for them.
It's a never-ending battle with Big Industry, Monsanto, Bayer, etc, etc. I'm beginning to think it'll never end whilst we have the current political mindset.
BTW, there's some truth to the 'cisterns of lead' being less poisonous although that wouldn't be tolerated these days. Not that long ago I've stayed in houses with lead water pipes. As far as I know they've not been changed, so until recently it was a common practice to use lead for water distribution. However, note carefully Noyce's caveat about the type of water that should be stored within them.
> Slow development of normal childhood behaviors, such as talking and use of words, and permanent intellectual disability are both commonly seen.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning#Effects_on_chil...
If lead is really a widespread problem, and especially if it continues worsening, then we'll eventually reach a point where we need to identify individuals who have been impacted by lead and ideally take pre-emptive measures to help them with the consequences of it.
This makes me wonder how people with more woke attitudes approach other group-specific issues like sickle cell anemia in black people or myopia in Asian and Jewish people. In these cases, being XYZ does define you and the things you're at risk for.
This is extremely broad and it feels like a bit of a strawman - a classic feminist issue I've heard is how office chairs are often designed more for the average height of a man, therefore subtly excluding women from the workspace.
"people with more woke attitudes" would absolutely be on board with measures such as ensuring Asian people get the eye care they need (I suspect).
You're right, but people are still starting to call this racism. I've been in the meetings where HR hammered home the point, and I quote "race is a social construct with no biological meaning". And some our software is supposed to support medical fields :(
https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/ov8ew6/article_ci...
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-res...
Consider how many different ethnic groups have ancestry going back millenia on Africa, Europe and Asia, and all the differences between ethnic groups. Why is race primarily divided up based on skin tone instead of some other biological feature? What biological markers dictate the boundaries of racial categories? It can't be skin tone, because there are South Asians and Australians who have very dark skin. There are Southern Europeans who can be noticeably darker than some Middle Easterners and Northern Africans.
Where is the dividing line? Historically, it changes over time. If Irish, Italians and Eastern Europeans weren't considered white until sometime in the 20th century, then that shows that race is a cultural construct.
However, the existence of a dividing line shouldn't be a requirement for a useful definition of race that admits the existence of average-level genetic differences; i.e. differences in gene frequency that lead to real and meaningful differences on average, that we can observe & that matter to real-world outcomes.
That quote you shared sets up an overly strict definition of "separate racial groups" that seems designed to guarantee the conclusion of "they don't exist". The sneaky word they've used is "separate", it's a rhetorical trick that allows them to unfairly use zero allele frequency as the requirement which is guaranteed not to be met even with very small amounts of gene flow.
> race primarily divided up based on skin tone
> race is a cultural construct.
I don't agree that race is (or at least, should be) primarily defined by skin color. Racists might do that, but I don't wish to argue their perspective with you, I am arguing my perspective.
Some groups of South East Asians share the same skin tone as Africans, but Africans have no Neanderthal ancestry and some of these South East Asian groups have high Denisovan ancenstry. These are genetic differences between these two groups that have the same skin tone.
Ashkenazi Jews and whites of European descent share the same skin color, but differ in certain genetic diseases that are more prevalent in one versus the other. These are genetic differences.
The existence of these average-level genetic differences is proof that race is not just a cultural construct, even if it is in part a cultural construct only insofar as it plays itself out in everyday perception and discourse.
Not only identity but if you follow this train of thought also criminal responsibility. If I'm not mistaken there is a well known correlation between (childhood) head trauma and serial killers. I remember a case where a guy suffered brain damage in a car accident as an adult, underwent a complete change of character and committed a murder thereafter (can't remember the name though).
These examples are extreme cases for sure, but the effect is much more subtle. There are studies showing that nutritious prison food leads to lower levels of violence etc.
We can barely get the funding today to replace lead pipes, the bare minimum to try and limit exposure, I doubt we'll be tracking down individuals any time soon.
* https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-push-to-replace-americas-...
==how people with more woke attitudes approach other group-specific issues==
I think in this case "woke" people would try to understand and empathize with those "group-specific issues" and help develop and implement plans to solve those issues. I think we see this in the "woke" political parties leading the charge on "group-specific issues" like voting rights, indigenous rights, immigrant rights, women's reproductive rights, healthcare as a right, etc. Just look at the typical political affiliations of the three "groups" you mentioned. It might answer your question.