Lead poisoning among US children | Hacker News Reader

Lead poisoning among US children

theguardian.com

246 pointsCRConrad233 comments

I had a horrible experience recently due to a demolition of a 1930s house just a dozen feet away from dozen feet away from our home. I have 3 kids 10 or under, 1 aged 2. The home's exterior was covered in lead paint, probably all original. The contractors doing the job were completely ignorant of the dangers of lead, and did not follow the basic EPA guidelines (e.g. laying down plastic, picking up paint chips, paint chips scattering into our yard, etc). It was basically an illegal operation.

We kept mentioning the problem to them, but you could tell they were ignorant of the dangers. The general contractors quote was "I'd be doing this the same if it was my daughter in your house".

Anyway, I printed out the EPA guidelines, shouted them down when they fired up the back hoe that they were in violation of federal law. Luckily that stalled them for the day it took the city to get out to the site and shut it down. Now the GC was no idiot, but his general attitude was that we were overblowing the problem. When they resumed work, plastic was laid down, they picked up the paint chips, but none of the workers wore masks. If I didn't aggressively take action, nothing would have been done.

> Anyway, I printed out the EPA guidelines, shouted them down when they fired up the back hoe that they were in violation of federal law.

When in doubt, call up your city's code enforcement office. They love showing up to work sites and catching contractors violating code. And the contractors will listen, too.

A someone outside of the US (and who never quite understood the state/federal divide!), I'm really curious about what state regulatory enforcement is in now. It seemed [0] that the recent Republican government aimed to make as much damage as possible to these safety nets. Are they still there and functional?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_policy_of_the_Do...

The states and larger cities have their own sets of regulations and enforcement agencies so it's not a simple question, but as best I can tell COVID restrictions and hiring issues have been a bigger blow to regulatory enforcement than the past administration, any changes they made would be marginal in comparison and are likely already undone by the new administration.

It's not easy to hire good staff when budgets are cut.

> who never quite understood the state/federal divide

This is key. The states in the US hold a huge amount of the actual power. As a practical matter the EPA will never be involved with something like this. It will be the state DEQ (or equivalent agency) that really has the teeth.

The original intent of the US foundation was that state be ran like nations are ran in the EU. That is, for the most part they are independent with a federal government that makes sure everyone plays nice.

That all changed with the civil war and the 14th amendment. After that, the federal government gained a LOT of power that it didn't previously have.

However, it's not something that was universal. In the US, federal still, for the most part, only deals with things that can be conceived to effect more than one state at the same time. There is, for example, no federal murder law.

With that in mind, you have 50 states and for the most part, how the little things are handled are entirely up to each state. What a state will do in regards to regulations and safety nets is simply all over the board.

From a non american viewpoint, I find it impressive that states like Florida and Texas have been able to do away with covid restrictions independently of all other states.

It’s a double-edged sword. California or other states might have more environmentally friendly legislation or support net neutrality and such. I lived in US and Europe and it is what it is. I can see the benefits and the downsides.

Very generally, federal agencies write nation-wide minimum sets of regulations (which have to be based on laws passed by Congress, which in turn have to be grounded in allowances in the Constitution - powers not explicitly granted to the federal government belong to the people/states [see below]). Some of these federal agencies have enforcement officers, but nowhere near enough to police everything. In the case of the EPA, the rules relate to pollution, toxic materials, etc (lead paint, asbestos, petro-chemicals, etc). FDA is about food production and drug safety. OSHA is work-place safety.

States (and cities, counties, etc) generally have their own building codes and enforcement agencies. But, the states still have to follow federal rules where they exist.

So, in this case, there are EPA rules about lead paint handling. Very likely three are also OSHA rules dealing with worker safety when dealing with lead (wearing a respirator). And while the EPA might have some enforcement officers, they won't be interested in a single house renovation (more likely interested in factories, sky-scrapers, etc). OSHA also has enforcement, but a lot of that ends up being after-the-fact (ie somebody loses a limb, OSHA gets called, and shuts down a factory until remedial action taken).

But, the local building inspectors office is able to enforce the EPA rules as well as local building codes. And there's probably a local work-place safety office as well. But, in the case of small construction jobs, local code enforcement is the easiest/fastest way to get something on-site changed.

With respect to the Trump administration, you are correct - he went out of his way to install department heads who were either incompetent or had business goals opposed to the agency they were tasked with leading.

[] - The 14th Amendment gives the federal government the power to ensure all people are protected equally under the law. Pretty darn broad power there. Similarly, the Commerce Clause in the Constitution grants the federal government the power to regulate trade between the states and other countries. Again, you can read that very widely - pretty much any serious level of commerce impacts more than one state.

> A someone outside of the US (and who never quite understood the state/federal divide!), I'm really curious about what state regulatory enforcement is in now. It seemed [0] that the recent Republican government aimed to make as much damage as possible to these safety nets. Are they still there and functional?

These are city-level regulations, and they're almost completely isolated from politicking.

Generally speaking: Most (but not all) news stories about US politics are greatly exaggerated. News media here competes for clicks, and the easiest way to get clicks is to transform every possible story into the biggest catastrophe possible.

In reality, while parts of our regulatory structure need some attention and improvement, the United States isn't really an unregulated wasteland. Just try building anything that doesn't meet code and you'll be in hot water very quickly, regardless of where you live here.

They just got a slap on the wrist? It seems like there should be much heavier penalties for spreading a neurotoxin ... ...

Would lead paints have a relatively unique RF refractive signature? Wondering if flying a drone with some wave guides could inventory buidlings with external lead paint, and then use the data for permitting to require additional environmental controls.

You really only need to know the age of the building to know if it has lead paint, generally.

Here's a link if you're worried:

"Lead Paint – What Years Did They Use It?":

https://buyersask.com/education-center/lead-paint-what-years...

Note that every contractor I've spoken to assumes anything built before 1978 has lead paint. My understanding is that it's probably going to be more expensive to test every spot you need to test for lead paint vs just treating it as if it is lead paint in the first place.

If it _had_ lead paint. Could have been scraped and repainted later.

Scraping and repainting alone won't remove the lead. You need to do actual remediation. In some places there would be records of permits for that.

The lead paint generally has been painted over multiple times, so the surface would be modern paint with the lead underneath.

This is super common in my experience: contractors pretending to be ignorant of safety regulations to speed up work.

>but his general attitude was that we were overblowing the problem.

I've had similar experience when talking with contractors about it. I've been told multiple times that unless a child eats a handful everyday its not a problem.

I'd love to see a massive project to test every child in the nation. It's hard to plan without good data. Once we know who is the worst off, we can better protect everyone. Of course, property owners have massive political clout, and they don't want to find any problems.

I'll believe that when I see it. We can't even test for a virus that's killing 400K/year. Nor can we provide safe drinking water for a city that's been stuck with crappy water for years and well publicized to boot.

Universal testing is very expensive and provides minimal additional data.

That's not an argument for no surveillance, it's an argument for reasonable surveillance.

Modern statistics is based around the principle of random sampling for very good reasons: it works. With a small but properly-conducted and truly random sample, you'll gain a tremendous level of insight over a large domain. The additional resolution increases with the square of the sample size. If you want twice the resolution you need four times the sample. Expanding a sample 10x only buys about 3.3x reduction in error. But your costs are up 10x.

In the case of environmental toxic exposure, you'd want to conduct stratified sampling that focuses on known problematic areas (high population, high exposure), but also includes areas in which exposure risk is thought to be low.

For specific treatment, you'd likely need to test individuals. That's not the same as determining where the problem is. And ultimately remediation and prevention is hugely more effective that retrospective treatment. In the case of lead, once there's been exposure, harm has already been done.

Were they wearing masks while working? Lead is dangerous, but outdoors and masked, the risk is low. I kind of doubt that there’s even a big risk to your kids if you’re in the next house over. The problem is fine particulates which don’t dissipate quickly in open air.

Thanks for standing up for your neighbors and community. We need more people like you who can sound the alarm for us who are unaware of the hazards all around us.

In 2014 I consulted my father, a lawyer, in writing an amicus brief to a lawsuit relating to lead exposure in baby food.

Basically, lead exposure testing in food can have highly-variable results because of how the particles adhere to the food substrate, variability between food batches, and the way the exposure tests work. Because of this, lead exposure testing generally involves testing several samples and taking the mean to estimate the real level of exposure.

Despite several samples showing high levels of lead, the defense got off by claiming that the geometric mean was the correct average to use to infer the total exposure. This is obviously incorrect because the geometric mean is a multiplicative mean. With a geometric mean, all you need is one sample with lead exposure close to 0 to get a mean that's close to 0, even if all the other samples tested positive for extreme levels of lead exposure.

Just as a sanity check, we checked official literature on food toxicology, and every resource we could find stated that using arithmetic mean was the correct methodology, and not one mentioned geometric means.

The defense ended up winning the case, which is absolutely horrifying because 1.) baby food is the most dangerous product imaginable to contain lead and 2.) now there is a legal precedent to defend yourself against lead exposure claims using total BS statistics.

Edit: thankfully, it looks like the FDA is getting involved now https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021/10/01/baby-foods-co...

> With a geometric mean, all you need is one sample with lead exposure close to 0 to get a mean that's close to 0, even if all the other samples tested positive for extreme levels of lead exposure.

Not going to comment on whether arithmetic or geometric mean is more appropriate, but your comment is incorrect.

Yes, a number close to 0 brings everything down. But then you take the nth-root, which brings it back up again. Some examples - assume one of the numbers is 0.01 (close to 0).

    2 samples means square root - that becomes 0.1
    3 samples means cube root - that becomes 0.215
    10 samples means 10th root - that becomes 0.63
    20 samples means 20th root - that becomes 0.794

The more samples, the less impact an outlier like a number close to 0 will have.

Put another way, the arithmetic mean has the same problem. Extreme outliers can greatly influence the sum. But if you have enough samples, each extreme outlier is tempered a bit by dividing by n.

If you want to be precise, what I meant was that there is no level of exposure in the first n samples so great that the geoemetric mean of n+1 samples is certain to be over any arbitrary value X

This is not true of arithmetic mean. If you have 9 samples with value 10, then the arithmetic mean of 9 samples plus one more is certainly at least 9.

Ignoring the context, and speaking only to the math, the two examples you give are not analogous.

In a geometric mean, picking a number below 1 is the equivalent of picking a negative number in the arithmetic mean. The multiplicative identity is 1, and the additive identity is 0. Going below 1 for the geometric mean is like going below 0 in the arithmetic mean. So mathematically, you do not have a guarantee with the arithmetic mean either.

Of course, in your case, the numbers aren't allowed to be negative. Either approach you take, there is some "contextual" bias going on.

Why is it helpful to ignore the context? My examples clearly state I am making statements in the context of taking exposure samples

I think you're making potentially invalid assumptions about the about the relative scales of the numbers involved.

The issue is that if the small outlier leads to the product being less than 1, the degree of the root doesn't matter because the largest value possible of the n-th root approaches 1, which may be below whatever meaningful thresholds are relevant here.

> The issue is that if the small outlier leads to the product being less than 1, the degree of the root doesn't matter because the largest value possible of the n-th root approaches 1, which may be below whatever meaningful thresholds are relevant here.

That is true, but I don't see the relevance given the context. If the geometric mean approaches 1 (i.e. after the n-th root), then you have too much lead. If all your samples have lead levels well below tolerance, then the n-th root of the product will not approach 1, but will be significantly smaller. Example: If all 10 samples are 0.01, the geometric mean is 0.01.

> “But if you don’t test for it, it’s like it doesn’t exist.”

This is exactly it. During our house purchasing process, our state gives you the so-called right to know if lead exists in a house. But all a seller has to do is check on the form that they have no knowledge of lead in the house. The house could literally be filled with it on the walls, door jams, windows, but if they check "we're not sure", then both them and the state have washed their hands of the issue. So basically, you need to test for yourself. Meanwhile, the state has covered their ass by providing the requirement of the disclosure, even though the disclosure is completely worthless. The same goes for radon testing. And it's practically impossible to get an offer accepted if you do not waive your right to test for lead and radon before purchasing.

It's just irritating to me that industries and the government go through all this trouble to do nothing but cover their ass and stop right before they do something that would actually help the issue in the real world. Additionally, nearly all of the stuff you do when purchasing a house protects somebody else except you as a buyer. It's amazing to me that there aren't stricter requirements, standards for testing, and regulations around testing for lead and radon, two things that are easy to test for but have seriously adverse health effects.

Also, it's surprising just how much stuff still has lead in it. When I was researching ideas for a compost bin in my backyard, many suggested wire mesh (aka chicken wire, wire cloth, etc.). However, I found out that the galvanizing process leaves a fair amount of lead on the wire, which could then leach into the resulting compost, then the ground the compost is used on, and then your garden vegetables. Just touching the stuff at the store now means you have lead dust on your hands.

Even researching what soldering wire to use is a pain because apparently leaded solder is just so much "better" when it comes to flowing than non-leaded. It just doesn't seem to be taken that seriously at the hobbyist level (whereas my understanding is that industrial processes already have switched to non-leaded solder). I get that it's easier to use, but what about when kids or pets are around, or you forget to wash your hands, or when disposing of it?

> But all a seller has to do is check on the form that they have no knowledge of lead in the house. The house could literally be filled with it on the walls, door jams, windows, but if they check "we're not sure", then both them and the state have washed their hands of the issue

You're using moralizing language, but what else do you think could happen here? Barring government funding, by-the-book remediation costs a lot of money. So the two options are either completely remediating the lead and offer that as a selling point, or just kicking the can down the road ("I don't know but it was painted before 1978 so make your own informed guess"). If the seller checked the box for positive existence of lead, they would be doing you no favors since you'd be getting the exact same physical house, but would also have to check the known-lead box when selling the house down the line.

If you only want to buy a house that has been fully remediated, you could make your offer contingent upon that. But since your offer has to be competitive with the rest of the market, that would cost a similar amount to buying the house as it is and then doing your own remediation afterwards.

If you go to rent that house out and the renters have small kids, then you can no longer kick the can down the road. It makes for a painful immediate situation, but barring government funded remediation or straight up mandating that every bit of lead paint needs to be remediated before a house can be sold (despite it being fine for the majority of people), I don't see how else it could be handled.

The problem is that there is an incentive to not check.

But the state could easily change that. The state could introduce a law where the seller must cover remediation costs if lead is discovered after the sale.

Then sellers would have an incentive to check for lead contamination ahead of the sale.

> what else do you think could happen here?

The seller could actually care about the health of the fellow human being they're doing business with.

> proper remediation costs a lot of money

So what? Not doing it means harming other people. That's criminal negligence.

Inert lead, like asbestos, is safe to be around. It only really becomes a problem if you start taking actions that could allow it to become airborne in some way. There's nothing especially negligent about allowing lead paint to remain somewhere, especially if it's been sealed under layers of non-lead paint as is going to be the case in most situations at this point.

One point is that one should be proactive in testing things on your house and property because no one else is going to do it, which is obviously and unfortunately exclusionary due to socioeconomic factors, as the article points out. Although that only gives you power to test things you have control over.

The other point is basically what you've already made by your elaborations. The entire lead and radon disclosure and right to test is basically theater. The disclosures are toothless, and at least in the market I'm in, you will not get an offer accepted if you keep your right to test. So the whole thing is pointless and only exists to protect industries and governments from repercussions. As you've also pointed out, the current process just creates conflicts of interests.

For radon, testing is cheap and easy. I think short term testing or testing records should be required when selling/buying a house with long term testing recommended (and prior long term test logs provided). For lead, I agree that the situation on testing and remediation is more complicated. For one, it shows the major and long-running repercussions to using and allowing lead in the first place and for so long. I.e., there are consequences to our actions and they can create a mess. In my view, actual knowledge is better than the current situation, which is one of theater, covering ass, and conflicts of interests. The practicalities of enforcing that knowledge I think are tough, but it should be better attempted. I don't think it's reasonable to completely remove lead from houses. That can basically only be done by a gut renovation (to my knowledge). But I do think it's more reasonable to think about testing and logging when it comes to windows, door frames, and other high probability areas, including when these areas were last replaced or last painted.

> [the seller] and the state have washed their hands of the issue

I took this as judgement that the seller or the state should be doing something else. Which seems like you, as the new owner of the house, wanting someone else to have completely solved the problem for you without fully owning that stance and paying to get it done. It seemed like you were passing this judgement having only considered half the issue, which feels like the same perspective that got us this useless do-something disclosure legal dance in the first place.

Ignore that feel-good disclosure song and dance, here is the actual knowledge: if you're buying a house that was built before 1978, it behooves you to assume that every painted surface has been painted with lead paint, period. The "what if" scenario isn't the house having lead, it's the house not heaving lead - a newer-built addition could be a lead-free bonus. But barring any written representation by the seller or negative test, that's the condition of the house.

There are other comments in this thread talking about remediation companies being a racket (not surprising because any time anything gets regulated in such a way, it becomes a captive market). Making testing mandatory would further entrench that racket - eg "your house tested positive for lead when you bought it, and now it's testing negative. How could that have happened without hiring a certified ripoff remediation company?". In reality a P100 respirator, good worksite hygiene, and disposal in municipal trash will get the job done (at least last time I checked a decade ago, disposal regs may have changed).

(I'm sympathetic to the socioeconomic angle, but enforcement of current tenant law as written would actually solve that for lead paint, at least in the states I'm aware of. So unless you're thinking a government program that pays for proactive lead remediation, I don't know what else could be done)

Radon is comparatively cheap to mitigate. Burying your head in the sand about that is kinda dumb.

Completely removing lead is economically unfeasible. When we bought our house, which was built in '72, we replaced all the door jams and window sills. It wasn't as cheap as mitigating radon but it wasn't "tear out all the drywall" expensive, and should generally be good enough as long as you don't let the house completely deteriorate.

Only once have I physically encountered leaded solder, and immediately wrapped it up with the lead-acid batteries I had to take to hazardous waste in my city.

I always try to reduce the exposure I have for myself if at all possible. My family's house was built in the 80's and we've ensured that there's no leaded paint on the house or water pipes on the property.

Every realtor has told me not to test for lead paint. If the house is older it has it, so if you test you have to check the box and then the new buyer will make you do something about it. If you don't test though you can remain ignorant.

Every house I've lived in has been painted a few times since lead paint was common, which covers up the problem. Getting rid of lead paint is possible, but not really affordable.

> Even researching what soldering wire to use is a pain because apparently leaded solder is just so much "better" when it comes to flowing than non-leaded. It just doesn't seem to be taken that seriously at the hobbyist level (whereas my understanding is that industrial processes already have switched to non-leaded solder). I get that it's easier to use, but what about when kids or pets are around, or you forget to wash your hands, or when disposing of it?

I guess I fit in the hobbyist you mention here so I'll try to chime in and explain. I use lead solder for my drone repairs and a few small home automation projects. Lead solder is not really dangerous at a hobbyist scale because the usages are spaced enough that even if you weren't washing your hands each month after soldering the measurable lead in your (or people around you) blood stream wouldn't be anywhere near worrying. In a way it's similar to asbestos, while it's 100% bad, the mere fact of studying in a room that has asbestos in the ventilation probably won't have an impact on your health. It's the longer exposure of say a teacher that worked 30 years in that environment that's much more dangerous.

There is also the tradeoff of non-leaded solder wire that needs higher temperatures. To compensate you would need to use more flux and that flux is a significant threat to your lungs.

> There is also the tradeoff of non-leaded solder wire that needs higher temperatures. To compensate you would need to use more flux and that flux is a significant threat to your lungs.

From what I've read, I did learn that this is an issue. I'm trying to get a setup going at home, and I've been debating on what to do. I know the lead solder can be mitigated and issues only come from handling it (and not breathing it in), but it gets tougher with things I can't control like kids and pets. Also, what do you do with the parts you've soldered? Does handling these not expose you to lead? I think disposal is still an issue.

I think part of my lament is that there just isn't a lot of pressure to find better solder materials for non-industrial use. I'm assuming industrial use has solved problems. Although I can be careful with lead solder at home, it still feels wrong to be buying it and then disposing of it, even through the proper recycling/disposal channels. Lastly, I actually didn't realize until recently that solder had such significant lead portions in it (if I did, I forgot), which means that all the times I handled it at work (admittedly infrequent) was done without that knowledge. That's on me, but that was part of my point that it's in things that may not be clear to people.

If you are really concerned about flux and lead I would suggest using a lead-free solder with a good (i.e. not the cheap on with "active charcoal filters") fume hood.

As far as handling leaded PCB goes I really don't see it as being an issue unless you voluntarily lick it, and even then I am not sure that there would be nefarious consequences (aside from probably getting sick from leftover flux).

What I do is just use leaded solder but wash my hands afterwards. I solder about every two weeks so I just don't think it would even show up in a blood work. I don't have children but I suppose you can just lock your supplies somewhere or educate them depending on their age.

I use Senju M705 alloy solder, it flows fine at reasonable temperatures and their newer flux formulations are less toxic. The development work on lead-free solder continues apace, so there have been a wider and wider array of low temperature lead free alloys on the market in recent years. This differs from the lead solder world a little in that there has only been three or four formulations out there since the 1950s.

Personally, I think a lot of the avoidance of lead free solder by hobbiests is based on unfamiliarity with it. Once you have spent significant time working with it you get used to it and can work with it well.

>Even researching what soldering wire to use is a pain because apparently leaded solder is just so much "better" when it comes to flowing than non-leaded.

This used to be true (I remember having to grind through many different solders on different boards for work and they sucked compared to the Multicore 60/40 5 core rosin fluxed solder), but modern alloys are pretty good. Whatever you're using you must use ventilation too, so the comments about flux are already answered.

I feel that there's a much wider range of soldering tasks that solder has to cope with now. In the past hobbyists had single or dual layer PCBs with big pads and through hole components, or stranded wire and big connector buckets. But now we have tiny surface mount components on tiny pads, or a big FET on a 12 layer board with a big ground plane. If it's something you're doing at work you get used to the feel of it and can set your iron station up accordingly, but if you're a hobbyist you don't get that practice and set up time.

I don't understand why people wouldn't bother testing for radon - the mitigation systems tend to be cheap when compared to getting rid of lead, which might involve tearing out all your drywall.

A few years ago I bought a 90 year old house and it was an eye opening experience.

My state has fairly strict lead laws and a lead paint test is required if you purchase a house built before a certain date and have children below a certain age. But I only knew that because I carefully read all paperwork in the process. No realtor mentioned it, but begrudgingly agreed when asked about it. None of my friends with kids had done a lead test when they purchased homes built before the cutoff date. Many of whom have gone on to do renovations.

So I get the lead test (independent lead testing company as required by state law) and many painted wooden surface had lead paint at the base layer (but not the top). The required mediation was for all lead paint to be removed from friction surfaces and windowsills, and all other surfaces needed intact paint over the lead paint.

It cost $40k for the remediation and they did an absolutely horrible job. Zero common sense. It didn't fit the letter of the law or spirit of the law. The house would have been hardly safer than before mediation. Yet it passed independent inspection with no problem. I had to fight hard to get the remediation company to come back and fix the sloppy work. It took almost $60k and delayed moving in to the house for four months.

I came away from the experience convinced that the lead remediation operations in my area are a racket. The inspectors don't care. The remediators don't care. And I only know one other family that even bothered to do the required testing when they bought their house. And this is in a fairly affluent area. So it does not surprise me that we have a lead poisoning problem.

There's a reason people avoid the testing. It's because the remediation companies are a racket and the fact of learning you have lead in the house is value destructive way beyond the value gained from the knowledge.

My house was built in 1926. I'm sure it had lead paint. The windows have all been replaced with (crappy) vinyl windows. If that wasn't the case, we'd have done it, but otherwise, I had no intention to perform any testing for lead paint.

Sloppy remediation can make the problem worse. Can you talk more about the work they did on your house?

They set up admittedly impressive environmental controls. Everything covered in plastic and sealed with positive pressure in the house.

But the actual carpentry work was a joke. Hacking away at the friction surfaces with a coarse grit power sander and leaving everything chewed up with some paint in the deep areas.

The areas that didn't need to be removed but just left "intact" were peeling and crumbling all over the place. They would scrape a little paint off of a surface leaving paint edges raised off the wood where they would crumble at the slightest touch.

Here are some photos of their "finished" work...

https://i.postimg.cc/hf6c4VTZ/IMG-0542.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/Lgs25Txw/IMG-0544.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/vccGd0g6/IMG-0546.jpg

That sucks. Might be worth calling the city again to alert them to the incomplete remediation. Might not do anything, but it can't hurt.

As an American living in the UK, it's interesting to see the disparity in almost all aspects of the treatment of lead. In the US, for example, there is an abundance of research and activism coupled with laws and a huge abatement/remediation industry. In the UK, however, where there is a large stock of old housing that very likely contains lead paint, pipes, and other products, there is nothing comparable.

Are children in the UK silently suffering from lead poisoning, or "losing IQ points"? I have lead paint in my house and If I took my children to get tested at the GP, I would expect a strange look in response.

Compare this to asbestos, where a survey is always recommended when purchasing an older property in the UK. While I think a lead survey would be suggested in the US if purchasing a pre-1978 property (and is required in some areas when renting to a family with children), I would guess only a handful are done here every year.

In France lead paint completely disappeared.

But the main driver of criminal behaviour and loss of IQ is lead gasoline you breath all day long anyway and that's nearly gone too. I think Algeria is finally removing it this year, it was one of the last country.

Algeria ended it this summer.[0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/30/leaded-p...

I'm curious as to if Cuba still uses leaded gasoline, as quite a few years ago I spent a night in Havana during a cruise and some sight-seeing around the old city.

I knew that the exhaust of vehicles smelled different from the U.S., or even busy cities in the U.S.

Cuba might not have a choice, thanks to US sanctions.

The official guidance is to not test, since the test wasn't very good, the number of kids with genuine issues is low (so high false negative rate) and the treatments being dangerous if you don't actually have the problem.

It should be relatively easy to get someone to test your water though, and get that sorted if there's an issue found.

The intersection of "your neighborhood has lots of lead in it" and "you flunked an inaccurate test" probably has a lot fewer false positives in it, right? You were exposed to lead. You might have lead poisoning, we can't be certain, but you're categorically in danger of getting it, based on environment and/or behaviors.

Note, I'm talking about UK guidance. Possibly they're missing some cases, but they do have a program of nationwide testing to monitor if there's any issues and the NHS has a direct financial incentive to report it and get it fixed via prevention if it's an issue.

As a landlord in the US I have to sign a lead paint disclosure every year for my tenants stating I have no knowledge of lead paint on the property. This may be state specific though.

I got one of those papers from my landlord. It's a beautiful document that I can, at best, use as toilet paper.

My landlord has no knowledge of any of the work that was done on the building, prior to him buying it. The previous managers did not keep meticulous records.

Is there lead paint on the property? Maybe. Maybe not. My landlord not knowing about it doesn't change anything in this equation.

If the property is older than the mid-1970s or so, it likely has lead paint. (It was banned in the US in 1978 but I don't know how widespread its use was in the years leading up to the ban.)

Related New Jersey had an odd requirement of repainting between tenants of apartments to try to remediate it. (Cynically kickbacks seem more likely given a proper stripping would fix it more permanently.)

Landlords need to paint every few years. The better ones are painting between tenants anyway. Paint is cheap, and covers a lot of ugly (most of it harmless ugly). Thus I doubt the state got much push back. Doing a proper lead mitigation would be expensive.

I think the biggest issues is probably lead piping. Lead in paint only becomes a problem when it starts chipping and chalking. It should still be removed eventually however.

Lead piping, galvanized steel piping with lead service lines, lead paint, your actual back yard if you live in an area that was densely populated during the leaded gasoline era, the kitschy old toys at grandma and grandpas house... the biggest issue can be just about anything, depending on your specific living environment.

Lead plumbing should absolutely be removed where its found. Lead paint... Is a different story. As long as its not chipping or easily accessible it's not really that much of a problem.

But presumably if somebody starts sands it down, people can get exposed to very high levels.

The boy's story in the article involves lead paint.

I'm doubtful that painters here in the UK take great care over it. And from what I've read, it may be the costs fall heavily on kids and not so much adults.

> In the UK, however, where there is a large stock of old housing

note that the article mentions Rhode Island. The US northeast is full of a lot of very old houses, and is a lot "closer" to the UK in terms of age of average house than the US western states.

Basically all older houses in the Northeast US--which as you say is many of them--have lead paint to greater or lesser degrees. (As well as elsewhere of course. It's just that the average age in the Northeast tends to be older.) If you get new windows installed for example, the installers just assume they have to take lead mitigation efforts. There's really not much you can do about it other than covering it up with new paint.

I suspect there is lead pipe in my water supply in London, UK. I got a lab test done in Germany -- I checked the German standards and I believe they mandate the use of the appropriate testing techniques; it seems impossible to get a reliable test done in London. The measured lead concentration was not above the last EU recomended safe level before they decided there was no safe level, but it wasn't much lower than that either.

The agency in London responsible, Thames Water, will replace any lead pipe in the public network leading to your building if you agree to replace any lead pipe on your property within 3 months.

But I live in a "leasehold" flat (common in London). So "you" for the purposes of that agreement would be not me but the "freeholder", who is responsible for building maintenance. To get them to do anything, I have to go to a lot of effort to get action out of the "management company" hired by the freeholder (and probably then be blamed by other leaseholders -- most of whom don't live here -- for costing them money to replace the pipe). I followed up with them maybe four times before giving up. I'm not the customer of the freeholder or of the management company. Reading up on the impact on adults (thought to be low compared to the impact on kids), I decided to just run my tap for a few minutes every day and store water to drink for that day (wasting lots of water in the process). I notified the other residents, some of whom have children, suggesting I could help take it further if others helped out. Nobody responded.

I live in a 1920s home. No asbestos that I know of thankfully but it does have lead paint that's been covered by 20+ layers of paint. The windows are the biggest concern since they are original and in relatively poor condition. They are painted shut so no issues of paint chipping off during opening. Unfortunately single pane windows are just prone to condense water which leads the paint to chip so annual re-painting is what I do. My young toddler loves playing on the windows and there's not much one can do to stop him. I just try to wash his hands before meals.

Also it's frustrating because I asked my pediatrician for blood lead test and they wouldn't do it as they said it's unnecessary. I am going to switch doctors and try to push harder at the next checkup. I've heard there is a finger prick test that's not very good and then a blood draw that's actually fairly good but of course more invasive.

I'm sure the neighborhood has lead all over in the soil so it'd be nice to keep an eye on the levels. There's also some more modern concerns like the shredded tires used in one playground or the crumb rubber used in another.

> Also it's frustrating because I asked my pediatrician for blood lead test and they wouldn't do it as they said it's unnecessary. I am going to switch doctors and try to push harder at the next checkup. I've heard there is a finger prick test that's not very good and then a blood draw that's actually fairly good but of course more invasive.

Huh, yeah, sounds like you need a better pediatrician. That's not cool.

Several states in the Northeast also have mandatory testing for lead levels for young children.

>I asked my pediatrician for blood lead test and they wouldn't do it as they said it's unnecessary

Ask to get that refusal in writing. I bet they'll change their mind.

> Also it's frustrating because I asked my pediatrician for blood lead test and they wouldn't do it as they said it's unnecessary.

It's certainly not part of the usual screening tests but it would make sense for certain populations. Lead exposure seems to be more common in the USA, the CDC even recommends testing. In my country lead exposure is most common in certain jobs and those workers are certainly tested every 6 months or so.

> I've heard there is a finger prick test that's not very good and then a blood draw that's actually fairly good but of course more invasive.

The finger prick test is more sensitive. It has a higher rate of false positives. A negative result is good but a positive result must be followed up with a proper blood test.

This might be my hobby horse, and I've commented to this effect a few times in the past, but here goes:

Hobby aviation still uses leaded fuel and this is detectable near regional airports. The primary reason for this that the vast majority of the existing fleet is stuck in the 1970s essentially as new airframes and engine designs are expensive and viewed as risky.

A huge amount of this, "spraying lead on your head" is not for training or any similar purpose, but for amusement.

The vast majority is flight training, fulfilling currency requirements and commercial operations (135 charter ops, survey and similar, fire fighting, etc.)

Most of the pushback against lead free fuel is actually from the commercial operators that consume the vast majority of the fuel and operate higher compression engines that need the octane boost normally obtained with lead. The recreational side could have switched ages ago if not for the shared infrastructure. The recreational part 91 side is already increasingly using automotive gasoline through newer engines (rotax 91x series), increasingly common EAB airframes and mogas STCs. Given that auto gas is half the price in most areas, the cost sensitive recreational market has already been moving in that direction.

> The vast majority is flight training

Can you substantiate that claim for me? I've never seen a breakdown, since you've claimed 'vast majority' perhaps you know better.

https://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation_data_statistics/g...

These stats sorta disprove the OPs comment, but I think these stats kinda bury how a lot of personal flight time is also for currency and flight training, as a lot of pilots schedule personal trips to maintain their currency.

Also to note is that a lot of General Aviation is a pipeline for airline pilots and in countries where there is not such a strong general aviation industry there are higher accident rates.

This implies the _vast majority_ is precisely the opposite. With ~75% being personal use.

It is risky without a drop-in fuel.

There is a significant, recent milestone on the journey here: https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/faa-approves-600-engines...

That accounts for around 25% of the gallons sold per year, but the underlying engineering is in better shape than that first step regulatory approval indicates. (The fuel has been running in the test cell and flying in the higher-powered, tighter-margin engines for years already with the airplanes in the experimental-R&D category.)

The FAA just approved a blanket lead free replacement. It's still being rolled out but it shouldn't be an issue for much longer.

Just bought a 1985 home in rural Michigan with well water, testing for lead was never required by any part of the process. Post-sale I paid for a detailed water analysis, about $200, which found 4PPB of Lead. I called a few plumbers and they weren’t willing to do any inspection or make any recommendations.

It cost about $6k in total to install a (Kinetico) water softener & RO system to remove it from my drinking water.

I previously lived in Flint during the early few years of the changes that introduced high lead levels in the city drinking water. I tell this to doctors but they suggest there isn’t any tests they can do, as it is deposited into tissues and bones and not really found in blood tests, that such tests are typically for children.

I guess I’m just saying there is no doubt I’ve had a great deal of lead in my drinking water throughout my life so I think a lot about how it shaped me and the communities I’ve lived in, how it shaped my experience with school and work.

How many people are being treated for anxiety, anger, or depression in a seemingly incurable medicated loop, all the while unknowingly exposed to lead?

Anyway as a PSA, I suggest that you should only believe that your water is lead-free when it has been tested directly from the tap and you have a report of 0PPB. Landlords and home sellers have a financial incentive to ensure that such testing is never done, and if lead is found, I don’t know what can be done other than pulling out your wallet one way or another

To add some more color to the discussion: a water filter removing 99% of lead from water can be had for under 50 bucks.

https://www.consumerreports.org/products/water-filters-32980...

The average family uses a lot more water than a pitcher like that can filter in a day.

You can install 06-250-10-GREEN or 06-250-125-975 in an undersink filter.

We have a similar one with a larger reservoir. I haven't measured, but it can easily filter several gallons a day. If we needed more, I'd buy a second.

If you can, under-sink filters are cheaper/gal and more convenient.

Make sure you're using fluoride toothpaste so your pearly whites stay pearly.

Brita uses 2 gallons per day as a guideline [1] for a small filter.

Which is pretty much the recommended 2 liters per day per person for the family of four.

[1] https://www.hunker.com/13408481/how-often-do-you-really-need...

I was thinking that you'd want to use filtered water for cooking/washing foods/etc and not just for drinking.

But I guess just filtering the water you drink is probably already a big win.

Is bone demineralization an issue when using filters like that?

Why would it be?

No, carbon filters don't remove calcium and other minerals from water. You'd need a reverse osmosis filter for that. Or a water softener, but that won't filter lead.

Even if you drink distilled water, you get plenty of those "dissolved solids" from actual food (or if you're extra paranoid, a supplement).

There seems to be a disturbing lack of interest in figuring out how these people are actually getting poisoned. Will replacing all the lead pipes actually have an effect? Why is it that hundreds of thousands of people in Rhode Island drink water from lead pipes, but only hundreds are poisoned per year? What about other causes, like lead-based paint exposure, or less obvious things like giving your kid 5oz of fruit juice per day[0]? Every non-child pictured in the article is obese and I begin to wonder what their knowledge or interest in nutrition is - I know multiple people who feed their child way more than 5oz of fruit juice per day, even after I told them about heavy metal concerns, because they can't believe that 'getting fruit' can be bad.

https://www.consumerreports.org/food-safety/arsenic-and-lead...

Shhh, don't bring that up. Come on over here we have a nice identity driven controversy to get you invested in, look at how bad this [OTHER GROUP] is, they did this bad thing. Isn't that much more inflammatory, doesn't that make you want to click and complain more. Good, focus on what we tell you is important.

Good see don't you feel that dopamine, doesn't it feel good to be angry about things your identity is invested into.

Please don't post this kind of thing to HN. Like most high-indignation/low-information comments, it's well below the quality line for interesting discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm wondering this too, which exposure vectors? How much exposure is necessary? I really couldn't find anything on it? Will one inhale of lead dust cause poisoning or a spike in levels? Does it require consistent ingestion? Like we know lead is bad for children and the best case is lead free environment, but that's not available to most of us. What's the in between? How does exposure manifest in lead blood levels?

I just bought an old house with known lead paint. I had as much remediated as I could but there is still (covered) lead paint on the radiators, door casings, stairs, soil and porches.

What sort of exposure does this provide my children? How likely are these to be airborne? How much ingested lead dust is necessary to affect my children's blood levels?

We had a baseline blood test before we moved in, but now it's just waiting 4 months until their updated test, and me being an anxious mess and wiping everything down and touching up paint constantly.

> Why is it that hundreds of thousands of people in Rhode Island drink water from lead pipes, but only hundreds are poisoned per year?

For the same reason why Flint water trough lead pipes was good for decade turned dangerous very quickly after one change.

The questions you asks have answers. Those answers are clearly communicated in the news and research. They are basic information by know for anyone interested.

Just asking them reveals that you don't follow issues. This is not a good way to be skeptic.

There are leaded pipes in Flint, MI too. That was fine, until the city changed its water supply. Old lead pipes have a passivating layer, due to reactions with the water -- but changing the pH of the water can strip the passivating layer, and dissolve the lead into drinking water. I don't think there's a "lack of interest" in determining how the poisonings occur (otherwise I wouldn't know this about Flint). But, that's not the purpose of this specific study, which aims to be a cross-sectional analysis of how much lead is in kids' blood. This sort of study can inspire more targeted research into specific causes.

Chloramine also strips the layer, so mixing water from another district that uses chloramine can also cause this problem. Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't that the case in Flint?

I believe the same thing happened around the turn of the century somewhere in Pennsylvania? In that case it just affected one section of the distribution grid, not the entire city. Somewhere on the order of a thousand kids. IIRC they got free testing and I think some health care for life.

Findings This cross-sectional study linking Quest Diagnostics childhood lead testing and US Census data captured individual- and community-level disparities in lead exposure from October 2018 through February 2020. In adjusted models, the proportion of children with detectable (≥1.0 μg/dL) and elevated (≥5.0 μg/dL) [Blood Lead Levels] BLLs increased significantly among those with public insurance and for progressive quintiles of community pre-1950s housing and poverty.

Results Of the 1,141,441 children (586,703 boys [51.4%]; mean [SD] age, 2.3 [1.4] years) in the study, more than half of the children tested (576,092 [50.5%; 95% CI, 50.4%-50.6%]) had detectable BLLs, and 21,172 children (1.9% [95% CI, 1.8%-1.9%]) had BLLs of 5.0 μg/dL or more.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst...

We bought some children's sized coat hangars off Amazon and used a lead testing kit on them. They popped positive for lead :(

No name brand from China. I wonder what else in our lives might have lead in it..

Lead is still popular in alloying metals because it's ductile, easy to work, and easy to machine. I would assume if I was buying a brass product made in China it would have lead in it. I try to buy copper and brass plumbing products made in the US, South Korea, or other countries with strong regulation and legal systems.

Leaded brass fittings are still permitted for non-potable applications. You won't find them at Home Depot and other places that have giant consumer lawsuit targets on their back but if you're buying fittings not commonly used for potable water from sources that mostly do B2B sales you'll still encounter them and (IMO it's basically a non-issue in that context).

Just a note, is is almost impossible to buy lead-free brass in the US. Most brass labeled "lead-free" is actually low lead.

Naval Brass is the closest I've seen, and it's not exactly at the corner store.

I bet a bunch of Wish, Amazon and AliExpress cheap goods are filled with toxic chemicals.

FR gov asked Google and others last month to shadow ban Wish as they're basically a hazardous materials shop.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/france-take-steps-against...

To add additional dimensions to this, because the risk of lead per se is so salient, there's been a shift to using other metals such as cadmium as a substitute. Can't use lead because it's got so much baggage! Use cadmium instead!

There's a different set of issues involved with different substances — many problems associated with lead are due to its historical use — but lead is not the only heavy metal causing problems with health.

Not meaning to undermine what you're saying — on the contrary, I think it's more widespread than people realize.

Awareness with surveillance is important. Leaded gasoline (TEL), lead pipes, and leaded paint were a problem for IQ before the 1980's that most Americans view as "solved" today.

https://www.damninteresting.com/the-ethyl-poisoned-earth

Here's what the CDC recommends:

https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/prevention/sources.htm

It sounds like a problem of poverty means old buildings were never decontaminated.

It's also an issue of disrepair.

Any house built in the 70s (or before) in California probably has lead paint. Which is a lot of them - that's when the primary population booms occurred. Those houses aren't being stripped of all paint, instead you need to keep the paint in good condition.

I literally can't get my 1904 Victorian house painted with any of the modern energy saving paint on the outside because the contractors all look at the age of the house and say "that's a lead job" and then can't find a remediation contractor, plus want to charge me $100k for a paint job. But the house has been pressure washed and repainted with lead-free pain by the former owner. Has me tearing my hair, since I'm disabled and can't climb ladders to do it myself. So my house has a decaying paint job.

It's a hard problem.

Remediating lead is expensive. The standard appears that you sign an attestation that you don't know there's lead in the house. This leads to a situation where no one actually does any testing.

Lead pipes and contaminated ground have their own challenges, but I was under the impression that the cheap way to remediate lead paint was to paint over it. Is that not the case, or have these places not been painted in 45 years?

If you have a window or door that inherently rubs during usage, merely painting over it won’t fully eliminate the lead dust exposure. Similarly, chipping paint (from ordinary wear) will often chip off all layers of paint.

Painting over it helps, but isn’t an elimination.

It's "screw the poor by sticking ones head in the sand."

Paint chips. Kids touch the paint underneath, don't wash their hands, and then ingest toxic residue with their food.

No, what happens is they eat the paint chips, because lead is sweet.

https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/publications/health-matt...

I gave an example that didn't exclude any possibility, while you're disagreeing with a linear, all-or-nothing, black-and-white proclamation. Clearly you have an omniscient view into all child behavior. Please enlighten me as to how exactly, in specific detail, that you came about this fountain of perfect knowledge.

Urban areas still have high lead content in the soil. The obvious one is around the foundation due to paint flecks, but also any soil near the street, due to accumulation from car exhaust.

I always come away from these articles about lead more confused than before. I grew up in a house that almost certainly had lead paint. We currently live in a house (in Rhode Island) that almost certainly has lead paint (an initial test was inconclusive, but it's very likely). Millions and millions of households have lead paint.

So why was the kid in this article found to have levels many, many times higher than the average kid living in houses with lead paint? What are the practical concerns for a parent living in such a house? What happened here?

It's not even remotely clear.

Presumably living in a house with a lot of old flaking paint with paint chips all over the place. Which is the reason it's generally a class/income problem; houses of poorer people are often less well-maintained--especially if they're rented. In general, the houses with lead paint owned by people who are better off have the lead fairly well covered with newer paint. And/or lead pipes which haven't been updated.

I just put in a countertop RO system. It's likely too late for me, but if I have kids I'll do my best to keep them from having dementia.

Never drank city water, it's always disgusting regardless if it's toxic or not.

I've put in and maintained 3 RO under sink systems, but I've never heard of a countertop one. Does it have a product tank? How much are the consumable parts?

Currently, since I'm in an apartment, I have a subscription at an independent commercial/retail water store that has a 10-stage system. My mom's house has a 3-stage whole house water filter down to .2 micron, a water softener, and a 6-stage RO filter with UV sterilization. The whole house and RO systems use commodity parts and filters so they're not as expensive as those branded ones with proprietary "easy change" filters.

I bought an Express Water setup that cost $150 with a 3 year supply of filters for $90. I also got an alkaline stage that I put just before the carbon post filter (it wouldn't fit in the kit otherwise). Water input and waste output screws into the kitchen sink aerator.

There is no tank, which was the biggest con to me when weighing my options. I considered getting a tank to put inline with the output, but I don't think my pressure is high enough and my SO would not appreciate the counter space loss. I've been using a large Brita tank in my fridge for many years, so I just fill that up daily. It's about 30 minutes of babysitting: very reasonable while doing other chores. It isn't as convenient as it could be, but its a solution that fits the shape of the problem.

Sounds like you got taken for a ride. You can get a real RO setup for $150 from wateranywhere.com. They're the retail side of AMI who makes RO membranes in SoCal. The filters need to be changed 2-4 times per year, and the membrane 1-2 also. That's going to cost a lot more than 90. If you're not changing the membrane, that's gross. If it is, I don't see how they can do it that cheaply unless it's an ineffective system. A permeate pump (passive device accomplishing pressure exchange) increases the product-to-waste ratio greatly. In all honesty, a 100 gpd system with a tank is the sweet spot because tankless (200 gpd) is too slow.

Alkaline is a magical, hocus-pocus trend for Hollywood wellness, "cleanses", and hippies with crystals. They sell that nonsense at my water store because enough ignorant fools asked for it and are willing to shell out money because some celebrity probably endorsed it.

Britas are solely for taste, expensive to operate, and filter next to nothing.

A few things:

1. I paid the same price as your preferred RO solution. Water filters are a commodity. Additionally, the filter supply I bought is cheap as hell compared to competitors. The change schedule doesn't change between vendors. How exactly does any of this mean I was "taken for a ride"?

2. Alkaline filters remineralize the water. Not to any great effect, but they do return the pH to 7. The magnitude of the effect? Incredibly minor. The actual cost? Incredibly minor. Why don't you just chill out and mind your own business?

3. Britas are carbon filters. I assume you believe the carbon stages in RO systems filter next to nothing as well? Also, you'll note that the Brita is being used as a storage device, so your critique is not only unasked for but unwarranted as well.

I use RO for my garden, but not for drinking. The amount of water waste for a commercial RO system is fairly large. For what it's worth the WHO also claims low TDS water long term is not good for health/intestines/kidneys.

https://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/nutrientscha...

  • Direct effects on the intestinal mucous membrane, metabolism and mineral homeostasis or other body functions.

  • Little or no intake of calcium and magnesium from low-mineral water.

  • Low intake of other essential elements and microelements.

  • Loss of calcium, magnesium and other essential elements in prepared food.

  • Possible increased dietary intake of toxic metals.

Is this paper a joke? The adverse health effects they list are under the noise floor and there is no mention of the alternative being risking exposure to heavy metals with health risks far above the noise floor. Additionally, the recommendations entirely ignore the idea of remineralization. I have to wonder why they would publish such an incomplete study and conclude it with dangerous guidance.

Because remineralization doesn't actually work? Makes perfect sense to remove the minerals just to add them back.

  Many water treatment companies suggest that because reverse osmosis systems remove the minerals from water that you should add a remineralizing filter afterwards for the purpose of restoring minerals to your water. I’ve tested these filters and while the pH rose dramatically due to carbonates in the filter there were no minerals added.

  A number of companies use coral calcium as the remineralizing filter and it is true that coral calcium contains some 70 trace minerals.  The problem is that the water passing through a filter system is not in contact with the coral calcium long enough to dissolve it.   The water picks up carbonate and as a result the pH increases but essentially no minerals are added. You might see trace amounts of calcium and magnesium.

Take a multivitamin. Problem solved.

You're worried about RO water waste when you take a shower, flush a toilet, or wash your car. Get your priorities in order.

> Possible increased dietary intake of toxic metals.

How? What's the proof? If I'm not eating lead paint chips or arsenic-laden American rice, where are these scary "toxins" supposedly originating from?

I take a multivitamin everyday, so this is moot. FUD laundry list like telling people "masks don't work."

As a european I find this seriously disturbing.

We've had water supply for hundreds of years, even in Russia it is generally decent, there is no excuse for a first world country.

Bottling industry is harmfull, wastefull and inefficient.

My friend, the US isn't a first-world country. Just look at how many homeless and struggling poor people there are compared to the billionaires and the rest of the uber rich in their gated communities. And the number of shootings, mass shootings, incarceration rate per capita (highest in the world), and who is in prisons (elderly minorities serving mandatory sentences for petty crimes). In Austin TX, nonviolent crimes are no longer investigated or prosecuted for the most part. I would sooner compare the US to Brazil, complete with smash-and-grab gang robberies. It won't be long before gangs mass rob the public in decaying cities like Austin, Chicago, and Detroit. Just like Brazil or Mexico: lawless, corrupt, failed states.

Filter your own water at home if you can because the tap water in the US isn't trustworthy (chloramines at a minimum). I take my 5 and 7 gallon containers to the water store for filling. It's very efficient. I don't know why you're comparing RO to bottled water.

PS: It's spelled "harmful" and "wasteful".

> the US isn't a first-world country.

If you are going to use the outdated, broken, and useless-for-the-current-context first/second/third-world model at all you should realize that the US is the country with whom relations define whether a country is first-world; it is one for two fixed poles of the model.

If you want to say “the US is a capitalist country with intense concentration of wealth and too many people in poverty given the aggregate level of prosperity”, that's valid but even when the first-, etc., world model was current and relevant, that description was most typical of the first-world (including the US of the time). The second- and third-world had their own, different, typical problems.

Invent some new words and bikeshed about them. Let me know how that goes.

> Invent some new words and bikeshed about them.

There are plenty of existing words whose use wouldn't be wrong and that are widely accepted.

I mean, if you mean to say the US looks more like a less-developed country than a developed one, you could use exactly those words, that are currently in wide use, and have been in use since the geopolitical first/second/third-world model was current and relevant, for relative economic development levels.

Whatever, thought police. Have a wonderful day.

In some European countries there is a New Year tradition of melting lead and pouring it into water (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molybdomancy). The sale of these kits was only banned in 2018.

TIL! There's similar thing in Poland but with wax and on 29th November (St. Andrew's). Arguably, less harmful than using lead :)

My wife and I, along with our two girls, recently moved out of my MIL’s and into a building that serves as our home and my business (we do computer repair). During a wellness checkup, my youngest had to do a lead test because of the age of our new home (built in 1931), and they discovered she had lead in her system.

At the time it was at level 14, so they recommended we do some tests, and try to do our best to keep her away from any chipped paint. It was another four months until she was checked again, and we thought we had done so much better, but her level was up to 22. The health department had to come investigate.

Needless to say, our new home is covered in lead, and given our financial situation, this being my source of income and our home, we’re in a peculiar situation. We’ve got a lot of surfaces to treat, and her levels will take some time to go down. The building owner never informed us, and by law they’re not responsible for fixing any of it, but even so we’re not holding it against them.

Huge amount of misconceptions in the comments.

I bought a house and my realtor never suggested a lead test. Basically it’s on the homeowner or the buyer to request it, because lead is such a low risk to adults, it’s better to be willingly ignorant. This is especially true in urban environments where it’s far less likely that a kid will ever live there.

At the same time, you can 100% test for lead as part of an inspection. It’s just that there’s not a lot you can do with the information. If it’s lead free that’s awesome. Likely it’s not though, if it’s old. Sellers won’t really lower the price because older homes are basically guaranteed to have lead, so the test just clarified what should be assumed.

Now, I had a test done and there was a lot of lead. I had it mitigated. Lead paint was stripped to bare wood in tons of places, but it’s actually safe to have lead paint in places like intact walls. Walls don’t chip. Windowsills, door jambs, they chip. Even a very strict town in a strict state like Massachusetts won’t make you fully 100% de-lead, you have to remove anything with a risk of a kid eating it, or it sloughing off (like a door or window rubbing). All in all it cost me a few thousand dollars but I feel much better about the place.

i worked construction for a bit, and you wouldn’t believe the exceptions we made for certain “historic” buildings. i remember discussing this with my foreman, we were in an impoverished area of the city that just so happened to be “historical” by the cities standards. i am a-ok with preserving the past but these engineers told us that when we pull out the old lead piping, we gotta replace it with another lead pipe to “preserve the historical value” of the property. this was the lateral going into the housing from the water main. do you realize how ridiculous that is? their excuse was that lead pipes deal with expansion and contraction better than pvc, or some other type of piping. and they said that the inside of the pipes are now coated with some type of sealant that keeps the lead from seeping into the residence water supply. so next time you buy a city property make sure you check the water laterals, you can get this information from the city engineering office. i think the records are found in the same building as where you get your construction permits but you’ll have to double check.

As a kid (~10-11yo) growing up in Eastern Europe my friends and I would look for old car batteries left by dumpsters. We'd break them, take the lead grids out and clean them up, build a small fire, melt the lead, and then pour it into molds we'd make of wood, usually in the shape of ninja stars to play with. Fun times!

Combine this phthalates and Teflon and the Hormonal balance of newborn and frowning young organisms, the the balance of the endocrine system is fucked.

——

I have a theory about the seemingly rise in gay/trans people is related to the pesticides and the rise of this…

So in the Philippines and other sea countries, pesticides are so heavily pushed to rural farmers to the point where they actually have advertising signs (think political lawn signs) that they place in the rice fields that advertise the pesticide they are spraying on the rice…

The exposure to pesticides and phthalates and lead, and the robust bust still fragile chemical balance of the hormonal systems in biological organisms is whacked and results in, my personal opinion, an additive factor to all the different expressions of how humans identify…

/r/unpopularopinion

I suspect that if we did an ROI calculation on government funding to remove lead from buildings, we’d find a very good return vs. other spending in the infrastructure bills. This could serve as a solid backlog of Keynesian stimulus to inject money & jobs into the economy in recessions.

I recall in 2008 the recovery act included funds for broadband build-out, which took years to actually get through planning, and so did not serve the stated goal of getting people back to work; seems like you could do many of these smaller lead removal projects on a much shorter timeframe (especially during a recession when construction resources would tend to be underutilized as investment dries up).

I suspect ROI will be negative (especially given sky-high cost of US infrastructure projects) - lead is safe if not consumed inside. And AFAIK it happens mostly in two situations - old chipping paint and lead pipes. Even chipping paint should be a problem either when paint dust is everywhere or when children are playing with paint chips. Lead pipes are more dangerous and should be replaced but even lead pipes leak significant lead amounts only if pH is high (or water flow is high).

In comments to this thread I see what looks to me like a moral panic - people leaving in safe conditions are full of fear (and who are really unsafe are not represented on HN). Lead is not something which can kill you at a distance, or if you consume 1 μg of it.

Remember when they burnt down that super cockroach infested home, and it turned out it had like 50 years of layers of lead paint on it and the smoke affected a bunch of people in the area

I’ll find a link..

The tap water pH in my town is 9.3. This seems extreme until you realize the lead risk with anything lower.

https://www.belmont-ma.gov/dpw-water-division/faq/what-is-th...

> "The lead epidemic is the longest-running epidemic in our country"

This is probably one of the most depressing lines I read in this article. I've watched some of John Oliver's videos on PFAs and Lead (regardless of what you think about his other political views, I would say his videos on subject matter like this is quite informative). It's astonishing to think that organizations like the EPA were formed in the latter half of the twentieth century to remedy the negligence in making chemically and biologically safe products for human beings to use.

Seriously, up until the 50s we were making "radioactive toothpaste" and advertising it to the general population as being safe and effective: https://awesci.com/radioactive-toothpaste-shocking-ad-50s/

teehee amongus sus

This reminds me of the Flint, Michigan water drinking "controversy":

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/flint-water-...

Obama In Flint: 'Can I Get Some Water?' | NBC News

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjugN-nUHh8

This is true. There was a paper that shower Flint children’s lead level went up slightly during the “crisis” but were still less than half what they were a decade earlier.

> When public health officials in New York, Baltimore, and Chicago tried to enact regulations in the 1950s that threatened the industry's interests, lobbyists visited legislators and governors to get restrictions lifted. They succeeded. When Baltimore's health department called for the removal of lead from paint, the industry countered by proposing and winning a "voluntary" standard, reducing the lead content in paint. When New York City's health department proposed a warning label saying that the product was poisonous to children, the industry rejected the "poison" label and lobbied successfully for another label that simply advised parents not to use it on "toys, furniture, or interior surfaces that might be chewed by children," and deliberately avoided mentioning that lead paint was poisonous. It hired public relations firms to plan out strategies to forestall threats to the lead market.

> The lead industry even sought to place the blame for lead poisoning epidemic on parents and children, claiming that the problem was not with the lead paint but with the "uneducable Negro and Puerto Rican" parents who "failed" to stop children from placing their fingers and toys in their mouths. Children poisoned by lead, the industry claimed, had a disease that led them to suck on "unnatural objects" and thereby get poisoned.

> But the industry wouldn't remove all lead from their products. It fought every attempt at regulation. Industry representatives threatened lawsuits against television stations such as CBS that aired popular shows like Highway Patrol in which the product was depicted as dangerous ... All this despite records that show that the industry knew that their product was poisoning children.

You know how many Americans have a weird dislike of government intervention. These are the guys that paid to make that happen.

And then lead poisoned voters with poor cognitive skills are more easily manipulated into voting against their own interests or their poverty is used to polarize the rest of the electorate and achieve the same outcome.

COVID-19 survivors also have reduced cognitive abilities, equivalent to about 7 points on IQ scale, which isn't great for countries that have been hit with many infections.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...

No, they don't. This is a completely false statement.

I dunno, I heard that people who had recovered from COVID-19, including those no longer reporting symptoms, exhibited significant cognitive deficits versus controls when controlling for age, gender, education level, income, racial-ethnic group, pre-existing medical disorders, tiredness, depression and anxiety.

Completely false in that survivors all have 0 or positive impacts on cognitive abilities?

or that survivors have a range of cognitive impacts, none or only some of which could be the equivalent of 7 iq points?

OP has cited the Lancet.

> OP has cited the Lancet.

In an exceptionally misleading way:

> > COVID-19 survivors also have reduced cognitive abilities, equivalent to about 7 points on IQ scale,

Failing to mention that one key thing:

* He uses "COVID-19 survivors" -- which it sounds like that's everyone who's infected-- to refer to patients who were on a ventilator.

Further, despite attempts at case control, I really doubt the comparison population is well matched to those who actually ended up on a vent.

It's unsurprising there's a decent sized effect for those who are hospitalized in intensive care: this is known in general. And it may be a bit overstated here because of confounds.

The paper says

> but also for non-hospitalised cases who had biological confirmation of COVID-19 infection (N = 326)

I think it applies to everyone?

See figure 2. A standard deviation of IQ is about 15 IQ points. Only the ventilator patients have an effect anywhere near the claimed magnitude.

Average across the COVID patients weighted by prevalence of outcomes (to match the overall population's COVID experiences) is more like 0.5-1.0 IQ points. And some or all of this effect may be generated by confounds.

Figure 2 shows a pretty clear correlation between severity of respiratory illness and cognitive deficits. If it were really confounded or a random effect, you wouldn't see 100% correlation like this. I do agree their N could be higher for all groups, but that's really hard, and again the correlation is 100%.

I'm not saying there's not a real effect here. Hell, if there wasn't, that would be unexpected: just about any sickness is correlated with measuring lower cognitively for a time afterwards, and being hospitalized and being on a vent are more so, independent of COVID-19.

I'm just saying that:

* The claim that there's a 7 IQ point drop from being a COVID-19 survivor is completely bogus, unless you're only a survivor after being on an ventilator.

* The effect size and causative relationship are dubious, because the controls and matching on this study are imperfect. There's plenty of opportunity for significant confound. E.g. if dumb people were more likely to not take precautions against getting COVID, it would look like getting COVID was associated with lower cognitive performance in this study.

Oh, yeah I see what you're saying now. Yeah it's too much to say getting COVID-19 chops 7 points off your IQ.

Makes sense

Poorly. The paper in question does not even purport to support this conclusion, when stated in such matter-of-fact terms.

It's a very interesting study, with laudable measures taken to overcome confounding factors. But I imagine the authors cringe when someone flogs it around as "COVID-19 reduces your IQ by 7!!!!!"

Yes, they do. The statement is basically verbatim from the article. They study findings are robust (n~=80000, pvals<1e-5).

To be "basically verbatim," there would need to be a sentence making the same assertion with different wording.

It's true that the paper appears to show cognitive differences lasting months among some subsets of people with previous COVID-19 infections in the UK. It is not true that the paper asserts that being a "COVID-19 survivor" reduces IQ by 7.

This is not only not "basically verbatim", but not among the assertions made by this paper.

I suggest you actually read the paper.

* Only the patients on a ventilator showed an effect anywhere near "7 IQ points" --- which was not a metric measured by the paper, but if we're going by about 1/2SD-- (n=44, not 80000).

* The P values are impressive, still, but that doesn't mean that the control population chosen to be "like' the ventilator patients is really equivalent.

* We already know that being in critical care or on a vent is bad for cognitive performance afterwards. Indeed, we know that being sick in any way is bad for cognitive performance for some time afterwards.

Is it particularly surprising? The UK Bio Bank study showed a loss of grey matter: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v...

This study was great because they had data from before COVID that was just part of the Bio Bank, so they were able to review participants already in the bio bank based COVID status. 394 COVID patients and 388 controls. Based on a small sample size of only 15 that were hospitalized, it also appears to increase grey matter loss based on severity, although sample size is not large enough to say so conclusively.

Pre-print, not peer reviewed. Biased sample, not conclusive. No long term studies done, etc. Also says nothing about IQ. Show me the clinical trials that measure IQ prior to Covid over a broad sample and then measure IQ 3 months, 6 months, 12 months after recovery, etc.

You’ll have your perfect data in around 5 years. In the mean time, there is significant evidence that suggests COVID impacts the brain. You can ignore it or argue against it all you want, but it is there.

That sample size isn't enough to say anything without some other controls in place.

Did you read the article referenced? If not, then I don't see how you have no basis for saying this is completely false. If you did read it, then can you explain how you square your bald assertion with the facts presented in the article. Notice that it's published in a Lancet associated journal. They have pretty high standards and I can't see any conflict of interest on the part of the writers.

> COVID-19 survivors also have reduced cognitive abilities, equivalent to about 7 points on IQ scale

Ostensibly true for those on ventilators. However, IQ is normed to those who are the same age as you. So if being on a ventilator also takes a couple decades off your life expectancy, then there isn't necessarily any difference, at least if you think of yourself as being a couple decades older.

Exactly which voting bloc do you think is composed of lead poisoning victims?

Both.

Smart voters wouldn't allow executive orders, forever wars, bank bailouts, hackable voting machines, winner takes all voting, the destruction of environmental regulations, subsidies to fossil fuel, unwinnable cold wars, outsourcing of all manufacturing, stagnant wages despite record productivity, record inequality, pandemic profiteering, opioid crises with obvious correlations, the smearing of heroes like Assange, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.

I think it's pretty clear that severe cognitive impairment would be required to think Trump was a good or effective president.

Can we please at least skirt around the political claims, here? It's not like disprovably-false things haven't ever been claimed en masse by leftwingers

Logically it would be the ones living in rural areas with old homes that haven't actually had all their lead removed, yet.

The fact that most rural areas are also conservative is neither here nor there.

Where these quotes are from?

FWIW, the parent article's question is "why despite of lead being banned for 30+ years we're still getting cases of lead poisoning among children"

Just a random article on the history, I felt there was a weird vibe of "well kids are being made ill by this lead that's everywhere for unknown reasons" as if it was some natural and unavoidable tragedy, rather than a century long conspiracy in plain sight, driven by greed that got us here. Paint manufacturers were talking publicly about it in 1904.

There's an American amazed at how good the US response to this threat is vs the UK, possibly overlooking that the UK government and industry basically banned it 15 years earlier than the US, massively reducing the scope of the problem.

The Doctor that in America is held as being responsible for proving there was an issue only starting looking into it years after that change in the UK had happened, decades after attempts at legislation started.

I feel there's an important point there that's worth thinking about.

What you are missing is the government didn't regulate anything meaningful in the end. The government threatened to regulate something and that had it's desired effect, lobbyists were hired, dinners were had and campaigns were contributed to. Now having extracted it's protection money, it goes on to protect the organization that paid them with weak regulation to placate voters. This is the system working exactly as the regulators planned.

Wait. Are you saying there's no lead regulation in the US?

Read the OP above, regulations were going to essentially end the lead paint industry, those were scaled back to the point of having little effect. It wasn't until later, when the lead paint companies no longer had money for lobbyists, that we saw meaningful regulation around it. Things like this are just shakedowns that happen in public, if they really wanted to pass regulations they wouldn't do the public "Sure would be a shame if someone regulated you out of business" song and dance at the start.

> "Sure would be a shame if someone regulated you out of business" song and dance at the start.

From the article:

> "Baltimore's health department called for the removal of lead from paint, ..."

> "When New York City's health department proposed a warning label saying that the product was poisonous to children ..."

What song and dance are you talking about? The only thing I see are agencies doing the job they're supposed to do which is protecting the public while these greedy pig fuckers sabotage them.

See the words used "called", "proposed" not "enacted". The science and public health issues around this apparently changed once the lead paint companies made donations to the right campaigns and the regulators ensured that the lead paint firms had plenty of time to do that by loudly telegraphing their moves.

If the mob wants to burn your store down, they'll just burn it down. They won't loudly pontificate on the issue unless they want you to try and stop them.

The simple fact that they wanted paint sold to the public containing lead to be banned or labelled as poison to protect people. There is no way you can think this was an extortion move unless you ate too many paint chips yourself or are a greedy asshole who doesn't give a shit about others (likely caused by the former).

> The simple fact that they wanted paint sold to the public containing lead to be banned or labelled as poison to protect people.

The simple fact is they had the authority to do that, if they so wished. They decided not to for some reason. Why?

Why did you edit your original comment?

And it keeps happening again and again. The cost to society of prolonged lead usage can't be properly attributed to the damaging parties since they've all long since ceased to be solvent - ditto with the next wave and the wave after that. There is a real problem with insisting that regulations be lifted to allow business development and then ending up with tax payers suffering the long term externalities, we've seen it with global warming (and we're still not properly attributing any costs there) along with fracking and other environmental disasters. In my former state of Vermont a nuclear plant (Vermont Yankee[1]) tried their damnedest to avoid paying for contamination cleanup.

This is a scenario we see play out time and time again.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_Yankee_Nuclear_Power_P...

Not only are the companies insolvent, at this point half the perpetrators are probably dead. Just stall long enough and you'll never have to deal with the problems you created.

Relatedly, I have been working on a project[1] to encourage municipalities to implement stricter land use requirements on gas stations because responsible party searches so rarely pay out. Here is a funny (depressing?) quote from an Oregon DEQ report I read recently:

"The site has a complex history, but the primary owner/operators have been Ron and Nancy Huddleston. The Huddlestons owned and operated the facility from the 1960s through 1979, when they sold the site to Tony and Michel Tocco. In 1987, the Toccos sold or gave the property and business to their son in-law, who after some difficulties running the store, returned it to the Toccos. The Toccos gave it back to the Huddlestons in 1988, who ran the store again until 1993. Finally, in 1993, the Huddlestons sold the store to Dewey Best (now deceased); Mr. Best operated the store until 1995, when he sold it to Harley Frisby, and operations continued under Kim and JeffBomark (Mr. Frisby's daughter and son-in-law). Mr. Frisby sold his interest in 1996 to the Bomarks, who declared bankruptcy in 1998. In May 1999, the bankruptcy court returned the property to the Huddlestons. Based on an ability-to-pay analysis of the Huddlestons, DEQ determined in March 2003 that they are unable to fund required investigation and cleanup activities. DEQ will continue to investigate other parties connected with the property to determine whether they may be responsible for cleanup costs."

[1] https://postpump.org

But isn’t it the government that ultimately prevented the proposed regulations? Why am I supposed to ignore that?

The interesting thing is that 'the industry' or a specific company doing obviously evil things is nothing but people. Somr researchers and spin doctors found the arguments. Some marketing expert(s) compiled that text. Another put it in a layout. Another signed off. Another contracted the print. Another printed. None of them took action to stop it - else we wouldn't see it today.

The evil underlying modern American legal and ethical systems is the weird understanding of a company as a concrete thing. This means none of the people that took the steps above ever faced (or even feared) liability.

> You know how many Americans have a weird dislike of government intervention. These are the guys that paid to make that happen.

> Americans

> Weird dislike

Sounds like European coping.

> These are the guys that paid to make that happen

A GAN's smooshed rendition of the closing line of every documentary. This style is distinctly le redditour.

What exactly is your background?

Regardless, nobody paid to make Americans dislike government, and if you crack open a history book you'll find that governments did that themselves. I'd recommend you start with the reasons for the bill of rights.

That said we should ban the lead

The government at the time of the Bill of Rights was voted for by, and therefore represented the interests of, about 6% of the population:

> Generally, states limited this right to property-owning or tax-paying white males (about 6% of the population).[1] However, some states allowed also Black males to vote, and New Jersey also included unmarried and widowed women, regardless of color. Since married women were not allowed to own property, they could not meet the property qualifications.[2]

Like the Magna Carta, and other historical staging-posts towards modern democracy, it was a step in the right direction, but somewhat ridiculous to hold it up as a reason to mistrust government generally.

I never argued that the bill of rights is a reason to mistrust the government. I am arguing that the bill of rights is evidence that Americans have had some unspecified reason to mistrust the government embedded in their culture since founding, well before the lead paint guys started buying power.

> The government at the time of the Bill of Rights was voted for by, and therefore represented the interests of, about 6% of the population

where that population is

> property-owning or tax-paying white males

So are you arguing that mostly white males dislike government intervention? If not, what subpopulation are you arguing it is that dislikes intervention?

I have a different take. Americans dislike government intervention because they don't trust the government due to corruption and being so easily manipulated by corporate interests. Fix that instead of granting government more power to wield its corruption.

That is a lazy take. Americans are the government. By claiming that the government is corrupt, the implication is that you and your fellow Americans are corrupt. The solution has to be getting involved in governance, from local to state to even federal levels depending on your abilities.

Which is unfortunate because there is still a salvageable amount of cohesion and trust in US society (free and fair elections, mostly good people with good intentions not explicitly seeking bribes, etc). At least, on a global stage, we are still in a relatively good spot.

“your fellow Americans are corrupt”

Yes! They are. And lead is the main culprit. Tv and sugar didn’t help.

I honestly don't think any of that optimism is remotely warranted.

And Americans are certainly very, very disconnected from the actual political sausage factory, thanks to corrupt media and corrupt law - why would you give them a pass here?

I'm shocked that so many Americans are so blind to so much rot. You can smell it in the air.

Even the Democrats are seemingly fine with executive orders, the Patriot Act, black sites, extrajudicial killings of American and other friendly nations citizens, smearing and torturing whistleblowers like Assange and Donziger.

"On a global stage", America is seen as the number one threat to democracy and world peace, and has consistently been seen as such since Afghanistan. It's wild that Americans don't ever seem to grasp how they are seen abroad.

It’s first principles reasoning: the only motivation for politicians to become politicians is gaining advantages they can’t obtain in the private sector. And since administration jobs don’t pay that well, corruption it is.

And yours is a naive take. Money wins elections in America, and regular people who would benefit from such regulations do not have enough compared to the industries fighting against it.

In other countries, when the government is corrupt, people get outraged and call for reform. In America, when the government is corrupt, people say "Well it's the government, what did you expect?"

America is like this because corrupt corporations spread the meme that the government is always corrupt, lest those pesky people demand that the government actually do something to those corporations.

With all of the arguments about government, elected officials have managed to divert attention from the two reforms that matter most: campaign finance and term limits.

Disastrous rulings like Citizens United, which further codified direct avenues to further government capture should still have people in the streets.

These two reforms would absolutely overhaul our system, greatly diminish corruption, and restore democracy. But, you rarely even hear them discussed.

Any popular movement to address corruption would immediately be decreed a "dangerous conspiracy theory" and demonized by the mainstream media. Any politician would be excluded from mainstream debates. And even if they could get into office, they would be totally unable to do anything, because the rest of the system would be against them.

I know this sounds like more of "well it's the government, what did you expect?" But my point is that the American government is rotten to its core and it's going to take _a lot_ to undo it. In other countries there is sometimes violent revolution, but we consider that unspeakable here.

With the number of firearms scattered around the USA, ripe for the taking (according to the media) - I'm surprised the proverbial nut hasn't been tightened enough for the bolt to shear - yet.

(I am not condoning or encouraging violence in any way with this comment)

Compared to most of the world, America's government system is still very competent and accountable. Think about highways, OSHA, FAA, NASA, etc. I'd certainly not call it "rotten to the core." Other countries' citizens rage not because they have it better than America - they rage because (usually) they have it worse!

But calling it fundamentally corrupt serves as self-fulfilling prophecy, because once citizens internalize the concept that the government is corrupt and nothing can be done (short of an armed revolution), then of course nothing can be done - because even in the most pessimistic scenario America will still take a generation before an armed revolution would look palatable. It sets up the false dichotomy between "uprooting the society and everyone's lives in it" vs. "doing nothing and saying that nothing can be done."

> Compared to most of the world, America's government system is still very competent and accountable.

Compared to third world countries. I'd argue most people complaining how broken US government system is are citizens of developed countries, most of which score better than US.

I dont think so. It this would be true, the same Americans would be for interventions that go against corporate interests.

Do you have evidence they are not? Because in my (albeit small) circle there is not a single person I know that does not want to restrict money flowing to politicians and/or their campaigns from corporations (even indirectly through paid for advertisements and the like). Everyone wants to crack down on this, but legislators have no incentive to do so.

The causality is the other way around. Because Americans distrust their government it is easily hobbled. It's open to corruption because it's too weak, not to strong.

The US has an usual degree of openness when it comes to the political process. Directly elected representatives, local politics, everything is broadcasted to the public, everything's open to money, and so forth. This kind of openness enables lobbying, it creates the opportunity to influence elected officials, which is considered a feature because it looks superficially 'democratic', but in reality just aids oligarchic interest groups.

The way to fix it is literally give more power to the US government, in particular the executive and regulatory bodies and shield them from outside influence, so they can do their job.

This debate also has an analog on the other side of the political spectrum, namely policing. The US police is not unusually violent because it's too strong but too weak, because there is too much symmetry between force wielded by citizens and force wielded by authority.

How do you fix corruption without giving government the power to fight corruption?

> weird dislike of government intervention

History is the best reason not to trust the government, because it has been behind unbelievably evil things; and politicians have promised to solve every problem you can think of 10x over, enacted legislation to do so, and lo-and-behold they all still exist.

> History is the best reason not to trust the government, because it has been behind unbelievably evil things;

Government, being effectively the primary means that people have to organize themselves, is a force multiplier for human impact; it's intellectually dishonest to blame it for the unbelievably evil things people have made it do without crediting it for the unbelievably good things.

I didn't argue the government deserves no credit. Enforcing basic rule of law is essential for life to be anything but miserable. I argued giving it power to "intervene" has a proven track record of (at worst) causing evil things to happen, and (at best) not solving what it has sought to solve.

To the topic of this article, it is largely due to government that we aren't still putting lead in our gasoline, paint and water pipes; most of the issue now is in the deteriorating housing stock that our (free-market-driven) development pattern (money goes into sprawl, leaving older, decaying housing stock in the hands of people who can't afford remediation, ditto at a local tax base level) hasn't updated.

>I argued giving it power to "intervene" has a proven track record of...

This argument seems kind of weird or hypocritical to me. Government is nothing other than a group of people. Same with corporations. Of course, when someone intervenes against what you want or against your morals, you're going to dislike it or may even deem it evil. As after all, that's your opinion. Problem is not everyone in society has the same opinion on matters, hence why politics is a thing.

Perhaps if you think the government (people) shouldn't have power to "intervene", you (a person), or another group you approve of (yet again people) also shouldn't have power to "intervene" either? Not that you were arguing this, but... hopefully I've demonstrated my point.

> Perhaps if you think the government (people) shouldn't have power to "intervene", you (a person), or another group you approve of (yet again people) also shouldn't have power to "intervene" either?

People shouldn't have the ability to intervene with my life choices or property. Government guarantees that others don't do that, but uses its monopoly power to intervene itself. To some extent, I would prefer if it were individuals trying to intervene, because individuals are far less powerful than the government. For example, the government can forcibly search me before I board a plane, but if the government weren't doing that, and only some airlines were playing security theatre, I could simply choose an airline that decided not to waste my time.

> You know how many Americans have a weird dislike of government intervention.

We have plenty of government intervention, but as you've pointed out these regulations are created by lobbyists for their special interests

The level damage that lobbying has caused and continues to cause in the US is absolutely crazy - you could say poisonous.

How can this status quo possibly ever be changed though, when the only people who could do so are the ones that benefit from it the most (corrupt politicians)?

Could you please not post generic tangents like this? It's specifically against the site guidelines because it reliably leads to lower-quality, less on-topic, more generic discussion—all of which, unfortunately and predictably, we got below.

Worse, shallow-indignant comments like this tend to get upvoted to the top, where they accrue mass and sit astride the entire thread, crowding out the interesting comments. That's where I found this one when I marked it offtopic (which downweights it). Doing that had a big effect - now there is a diverse assortment of interesting, informative comments for people to read when they first see the thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is why the romans couldn’t accomplish much. They would go to watch Christians being fed to the lions. Not at all unlike contemporary American culture. I hate lead so much.

As usual, bad reporting.

"‘We’re losing IQ points’: the lead poisoning crisis unfolding among US children"

no mention in the article how many IQ points. based on my research, it's not that much.

Citations and data needed.

I think the reporting is pretty good since it cites most of the claims. However you are correct that none of the sources say how many points you would lose.

"based on my research, it's not that much."

How much is not much? What if all i had is not much to begin with?

I mean, does it matter?

I would think there is no acceptable level of IQ loss.

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