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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know if lead levels matter much in adulthood? Found out my local water had lead, old municipal pipes. Drank it about ten years. Or possibly just two. Either way, wondering if I should be concerned or do anything beyond filtering the water (which I do now)

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People have a lot of misconceptions about water infrastructure. Approximately 6-10M lead service lines still exist in today's world. (https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/lead-ser...) Most of that is kept away from you by treating water with a chemical that causes a rust layer to form over the lead, preventing it from getting into the water at dangerous levels. Phosphates are typically used for this purpose. (https://alliancewater.com/why-the-us-still-has-lead-service-...)

Cities do screw this up, as evidenced in Flint and other areas. Not all filters are designed to remove heavy metals or lead, so you need to be picking a filter based on that. (https://www.consumerreports.org/water-filters/make-sure-your...) There's also other stuff in the water, so picking the right filter for your area is important.

Whether you're an adult or a child lead poisoning is equally dangerous (https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/lead-poisonin...). It is something that can be tested for though.

To clarify: the measured levels from my tap were high, though not crazy high. High enough the city gave a filter to local residents and said not to drink the water from the tap.

7 micrograms per litre, legal limit 5. This was after running the water for a few min.

I wonder what happens after, say, an earthquake? Can pipes bend enough to cause cracks in the passivated layer and temporarily increase lead levels?

Yeah, they probably could, but the phosphates are always in the water so it'll reform and the amount of lead that gets into the water when disbursed is pretty low ppm (parts per million). The fundamental problem is that this infrastructure is costly to dig up and replace, and the key word here is "service lines". Those are the lines consumers are responsible for paying for. Cities that have lead lines should be working with the EPA to set milestones and goals for yearly replacements with federal funding though.

Generally speaking, it’s not something to freak out about. Usually lead is found in the service lines from the main to your house.

Unless the people who run your water utility are criminally negligent (ie. Flint, MI), you’re fine. Run the water for a few seconds before you drink it in the morning to flush out sediment, and if you’re worried, use a filter.

Your water utility is required to test and publish results - look at those as well to understand if there is anything to worry about.

Provided the municipality treats their water correctly the lead should not dissolve into the water. Did you actually have the lead levels tested in the water?

If you're concerned get a blood test for lead levels. No level is good for you but adult exposure is magnitudes less damaging than early childhood (while brain is still developing).

I recently petitioned my local councillor to have my service line replaced at cost to the city. My only expense was to hire a plumber to do the connection to the house (several hundred bucks); digging was covered by them.

Where?

Montreal. Lots of old pipes. They sent city workers to check, determined my unit’s levels were high and gave me a filter. Planning work in a few years.

lead exposure makes people dumb af and mentally ill

Crude, poor delivery but you may be on to something.

I am curious if this is why you see generational differences in mental models and belief systems (there is data showing an inverse relationship between religiosity and intelligence [1] [2]), and why younger, healthier cohorts operate with different mental models.

Riffing, if younger cohorts are healthier, you’d expect their average/aggregate cognitive ability to be higher, leading to social stratification.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23921675/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence

I’m sure lead levels have some effect, but how do you control for “they grew up in a completely different world”?

I’d assume the latter is the primary cause of any major behavior differences, absent some pretty breathtaking science showing otherwise.

“Intelligence” is also a pretty goofy measure. If we’re talking about IQ, it’s basically “what quiz questions predict success measures, as defined by the social norms of whoever made the test”.

IMO that’s a pretty sketchy way to define intelligence. Certainly not the way I think about it colloquially. To me, success and intelligence are loosely correlated but very different traits.

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