A lady named Tamara Rubin has spent years testing household products and other commonly handled objects for lead. She uses an XRF tester, which is the gold standard for high accuracy lead testing. She has thousands of items listed, from dishes to door hardware to childrens toys, and a lot of these will put a family at high risk of lead poisoning. There's some woo-y stuff on her website, but her XRF data is a gold mine:
I personally have used both XRF and swabs on various objects around by home, and I found some really scary shit. The scariest were the older Lenox dishes we used for years; the decorative glaze on the eating surface tested high in lead via XRF, and the swab lit up bright red which means that lead was also coming off in our food.
I threw away all our dishes and bought new Corelle.
Other problems I found include old electrical cords and things made out of brass, including all plumbing fittings made before about 2012. These will also turn a swab red, especially if there's any corrosion, which means the lead is mobile.
So I went into a big rabbithole of writing up a long email to my family warning them about specific plates and so on. Then I paused -- was any of this real?
I looked up on Snopes -- they didn't seem to be too convinced that she's legit[0]. Some more googling didn't seem to show any reputable site repeating her claims.
It's hard to tell if any of this is true or not. (Especially since there's a difference between a _cracked_ or chipped plate vs a normal one)
That snopes article is one of the worst ones I've ever read. Snopes does some good work, but they also do some really terrible work, and this is a good example. The writer, Kim LaCapria, is clearly way out of her depth on technical topics.
Notice that the article doesn't provide one single piece of evidence of its own. Kim offers only a contorted narrative about FDA regulations and manufacturer denials, and complains about being unable to find "alternative sources". But the widespread use of lead pigments in ceramic glazes and paints is so well known, and so easily verified, that this is a bit like complaining about alternative sources for the color of the sky.
Tamara's XRF results can be easily verified by anyone with access to an XRF machine. You can take your dishes to any county health department and have them tested by XRF, and you'll see similar numbers. This is what I did with my old Lenox dishes, and the XRF revealed over 5000 ppm lead in the surface glaze. I've had dozens of pieces tested this way, including pyrex, corningware, radom kids cups, etc, and the numbers I get match Tamara's. And of course they do. It would be stupid for anyone to fabrinate this data, because it's so easy to verify.
Anyone can buy a LeadCheck swab for a buck or two and test for mobile lead at the surface. This is mostly how I test the stuff in my house, and it's how I know that my contaminated dishes were an actual poisoning hazard. If the lead comes off on a swab, then it will come off on your hands, in your food, and in your baby's mouth.
It's a similar story with cords and brass plumbing fittings. The facts of lead-based heat stabilizers used in PVC cable jackets, and the high lead content of traditional water works brass, are as incontrovertable as the sky is blue.
Kim LaCapria at Snopes doesn't seem to understand any of this. There's no indication that she even knows what XRF is, or how widely available these devices are.
I rely almost entirely on the swabs for testing things around the house, because they're what I have, and they tell you whether lead is actually transferable from a surface, versus being merely present in the material.
But if I had an XRF tester I would use it all the time. The swabs are relatively slow, especially the way I use them, and they don't work at all for some things. For example, a swab won't tell you if there's lead paint under a layer of safe paint. This is important because that lead paint is just as much of a hazard when it chips or when you do any remodelling. You can scrape away paint a layer at a time to swab it, but you'll never get a whole house tested this way, whereas an XRF could do it in an hour or two.
Every so often I gather up some particular things and take them to the tri-county health department here in south Denver for XRF testing. The last batch I took included some old red-painted hand tools, a chip of red paint from a yard decoration, a set of chinese-made pastel crayons that my kids got for christmas, and a bag of dust I collected from the HVAC in our house. These things aren't testable with swabs; the dust isn't swabable, and the red tools and pastels colored the swab regardless of lead content.
The people there are friendly and eager to help. I made an appointment, and the lady actually drove in for it from a different department. She tested all my stuff in about 15 minutes, and everything came back negative except for one of the red tools. Even the chinese-made pastels were completely clean, which surprised me.
Fun bonus: she told me a story about how the county health department updated their standard household lead testing protocol twelve years ago after some guy brought in a bunch of dishes that tested shockingly high. Guess who that guy was? :)
Yes! It was actually the lady's former supervisor who tested my dishes back then. She's since moved on, but the new lady told me that neither her boss nor anyone else in the health department had thought to look at dishes. I remember her being shocked and somewhat confused when she saw the XRF reading, and when the swab turned bright red she said, "oh my".
I felt like I was going to throw up, knowing that I'd been feeding my kids off those dishes for years. I've had to really work at putting that burden down and moving on. I never had my kids blood tested, and they seem fine, but I've love it if my experience helps someone else avoid the danger.
Yes, great callout. Relevant to many of us, is that many ceramic coffee and tea mugs also leech lead, especially if they have the colored glaze. I'm using specifically lead-free glass now.
Also, cheap glaze rubs off with the softest of scrubbing.
I remember begging my grandmother to stop using her cheap boil-in coffee pot. Cheap glaze wore down, then the paint, then the metal of the pot. Aluminum just leeching into all the coffee.
Didn't matter, she loved the flavor. The replacements I got her were used once because she loved me, then relegated to the cupboard.
She had really bad alzheimer's by the end. I'll never know if any of the cheap dishes and pits/pans('teflon' coatings etc), but it's always made me super paranoid about this stuff, I bought some testing kits tonight after reading all this.
I think it can depend on other factors too. For example, lead crystal drinkwater is considered safe as long as you aren't leaving the liquid in there for long periods of time. It's possible that's similar to the dishes.
Stuff like leaded fuel exhaust or paint flakes are more likely to be ingested/absorbed.
This is why the swabs are an important tool in addition to the XRF. If the swab turns red, then by definition it's wiping mobile lead from the surface of the object you're testing.
Using electrical cords as an example, years ago I went through my house and swabbed all of the cords. If I found a cord that turned a swab red, I either threw the thing away if it was cheap, like an old coffee grinder, or I replaced the cord if I didn't want to replace the whole machine, like the cords on all of our Oreck vacuum cleaners.
A lot of newer cords have lead in the insulation as indicated by XRF, but won't turn a swab pink. These I don't worry about too much, but I still tell the kids to wash their hand after handling them.
EDIT:
The LeadCheck swabs are pretty expensive, and using a whole swab for just one or two objects is ridiculously wasteful, but I have a trick that makes them cheap. I cut the cotton head off of a Q-tip cosmetic swab so that it's just a rolled paper rod. I activate the LeadCheck swab and squeeze out a drop of the liquid onto the upright surface of the swab. I dab the end of the decapitated Q-tip in the liquid, and I use that to swab the surface of whatever I'm testing. If something turns the paper red, I clip the end of the shaft off with nail clippers to get a fresh end, and continue to the next object.
I can get dozens of tests out of a single swab this way. I make a list of things to test in one afternoon, and I can get the whole pile done for the cost of a single swab, instead of spending hundreds of dollars it would take to use a new LeadCheck swab for each object.
Plus, the hard paper Q-tip shaft works better for aggressively rubbing on surfaces.
The LeadCheck swabs are super nice because they package the reagent in binary form in separate sealed glass capsules. As far as I know, this gives the product an indefinite shelf life. I'm still using a batch of LeadChecks that bought from Ebay fifteen years ago.
Can anybody explain to me or give me some materials to read? Say toy has 5000ppm Pb, how does that translate to it being dangerous? Child only touches it. Assuming soil have a ballpark of 100ppm Pb and we all love fresh vegetables.. how is this toy or even a dish doing any damage?
Not sure what you're asking. You want an explanation of how lead pigments chalking off the surface of an old dish get in your mouth? Or how lead paint on a toy gets into a baby's mouth?
You don't give your kids toys which fall apart and your dish is not losing 1% of its mass with your every meal. So I'm asking how much is it losing? How many grams of your dish may stay on your food? From a quick look carrot has like 0.1mg/kg with up to 10mg/kg of lead [1][2]. We just eat it and give it to babies so they're healthy.
So how much mass does a toy or a dish lose and how much of it ends up in somebody's mouth?
Based on the data above if you ate 10g of your 5000ppm dish that seems equivalent to 5kg of carrots. And I do love to make a carrot juice, that's like a few servings. 10g of dish seems like a lot to swallow.
I'm just trying to explain my lack of understanding here. I have just learned about these measurements and I'm clueless about the topic.
Kids chew on and swallow all kinds of weird shit. I've seen young kids chew the paint off whole sets of pencils. Babies put literally everything they can in their mouth. I've watched children lick window sills for fucks sake.
If there's lead glaze on the eating surface of a plate or bowl, and if you know it's mobile, as it was on my dishes, then it's a safe assumption that it's mostly going in your food.
Someone could spend a ton of time and money studying and quantifying the transfer of lead in all kinds of different scenarios, but what would the purpose be, when it's a relatively simple matter to abate or remove the hazard completely?
Food is a different matter, and I believe tested regulation of heavy metals in foods is sorrowfully lacking.
I have kids, and I also definitely agree that it's better if lead is not in there at all. The whole lead in gasoline story is ridiculous and traumatizing.
I'm just not sold on the idea of testing/researching products and getting rid of them based on what I've learned these last 10 minutes. It seems to me that it would be multiple orders of magnitude more important to test your vegetables if you are a lead-minimizer?
And what about soil? E.g. in context of playgrounds. Soil is 15-40ppm Pb. Really bad toy from 90s is 5000ppm. Exposure surface * time * ppm. Based on that equation it seems that testing playground soil would be much more important.
Assuming your lead-heavy plate completely disappears after 10 years of every day usage just ponder how much of it ended up in your belly compared to dishwasher cycles. If 1% of it disappeared, and you ate 1% of what dishwasher did, then it's equivalent to eating the dish weight of carrots during these 10 years.
I have no idea why I'm defending leaded dishware here, I do not recommend anybody keep their leaded anything based on erroneous math and data from some random HN comment. I would just like to learn if there is something I'm missing that would change my understanding of the problem.
Ok, that's reasonable, and I don't have any good answers. I just get rid of things and call it good, but the food is a big question, and it's not fair to the kids to completely forbid playgrounds.
Lead dust in houses is a well studied hazard. The folks at the county department tell me the things they address first are lead paint (interior and exterior house paint and soil around the house), lead in the tap water, and vinyl mini-blinds. Abating those sources almost always drops BLL in the kids. If that isn't enough, they go after toys and dishes. If I remember right, testing of food is not yet in their protocol.
For me the decision to get rid of the dishes was trivially simple. I'd be glad to find out that the food we ate off those dishes miraculously failed to pick up any of the lead that so easily rubbed off on my swabs. I don't think that's likely.
Same with the kids toys and art supplies. Sure, I can tell little kids not to lick their arylics, but why wouldn't I also make sure the yellows are cadmium-free, just in case they forget and eat a sandwich with paint on their fingers?
I generally agree. Anything you are consuming that contains lead is much more concerning than food contacting a dish with a low amount of lead for a short amount of time (implying minimal to negligible transfer).
Honestly, the amount of lead in dishes and crystal (when it even contains it) is low. If you keep the contact time with the food low and there's no cracks/chips/dust, then you're fine. As an example, generally drinking from crystal is fine, but leaving a drink in a crystal decanter is not.
> The biggest reason is that essentially Chicago and other cities around Illinois required the use of lead service lines all the way until 1986, long after it was recognized that lead was poisonous and other cities had stopped using it. A decade after other cities had stopped using it Chicago and other cities in Illinois were not only using it but requiring the use of lead long after everybody else.
Interestingly enough, of all the environmental hazards caused by large corporations, here's a rare example of one where this was primarily caused by a union, which while not opposed to the overall removal of lead, demanded the use of pipes which required specialized knowledge to install, which precluded non-brazed copper and plastic pipes used elsewhere in the nation, and effectively made lead pipes the only viable option.
On the surface, finally after a decade-long fight, the plumber's union, despite objections by its union spokespeople, said in 1986 it would defer to the city council after the matter was decided at the federal level, but in that decade, long after other cities had banned lead pipes, lead pipes were still a required part of Chicago building code.
As a former union leader I'd just like to say FUCK THOSE GUYS. Holy shit that is fucking infuriating. I did OHSA inspections to prevent shit like that from hurting our members AND THE COMMUNITY. I hope their leadership is burning in hell.
This is why the "right vs left" style of thinking drives me crazy.
Unions are constantly doing evil things, usually for the same greedy and power-hungry reasons as any corporate board, and to the same detriment of society at large, but because we think of unions as being on "our side" and latch onto this romanticized notion of the unions of the 1800s they get a pass.
The police and prison guard unions constantly do horrible things to increase incarceration rates, erode civil rights and remove accountability. Labor unions fight against improvements that would make their industries pollute less if it makes their jobs harder or would replace union-dues-paying members with technology or non-union jobs. And they constantly create artificial monopolies and cartels far worse than any of the corporate behavior, which create situations like the pilot unions where senior pilots get huge salaries and cushy routes while entry-level pilots are treated like slaves, or where you're not allowed to plug in your laptop charger to a wall outlet because only a union electrician can touch it.
I wish society was better at recognizing "this group is harming society for the benefit of themselves" can be applied everywhere- corporations, unions, branches of government, etc
It's not nearly as symmetric as you're making it out to be.
In terms of overall welfare, an additional dollar in the pocket of a typical union worker is going to be more welfare enhancing than that additional dollar in the pocket of the typical owner. This is from just basic diminishing marginal utility of the dollar.
Of course, unions can do awful, evil things - they are organizations of people and people are petty, self-centered, greedy, etc.
I'm in favor of workers' ability to elect someone to represent them at the negotiation table (because that is what a union is). I'm not unaware that sometimes those workers can elect bad people.
I'm also in favor of electoral democracy, even if I wouldn't personally defend every single person who has been elected president since the start of time.
Your second paragraph adds nothing except detailing your reasoning which only serves to exemplify the behavior the comment you are replying to is complaining about. The point of the comment you are replying to is that people have a bad tendency to ignore groups doing evil things for their own gains if they otherwise align with these groups.
Whether it's the moron on one side of the isle screeching about "mUh UnIoNs" or the moron on the other side of the isle screeching about "mUh SmAlL bUsInEsSeS" is irrelevant. People, you very much included, need to refrain from giving groups on "their side" a blank check to engage in evil self serving behavior at everyone else's expense.
Of course the evil to good ratio is not the same for any two groups or groups of groups. His entire point was that that liking one group more than another is a worthless excuse for turning a blind eye to that group's evil. Just because you are able to write a second (or 3rd or 4th) paragraph expanding about why you feel one group deserves a blind eye more than another only serves to illustrate his point.
Your behavior is exactly what he is complaining about.
Civil rhetoric really breaks down when it comes to politics, it seems.
Nobody in this thread was "screeching" about anything, and I don't appreciate being not-so-subtly called a moron. I have done nothing of the same to you.
I am perfectly capable of criticizing bad actions by unions, 2020 has had a number of them.
But I will not use those critiques as an excuse to argue that the right to elect someone to negotiate on your behalf should be curtailed, because I believe the right to worker self-determination comes prior to those consequences - just as I don't support banning "bad" speech even if that speech has consequences.
I'm not going to keep responding because, honestly, you seem to be shadow-boxing a conversational opponent who only exists in your own mind.
> In terms of overall welfare, an additional dollar in the pocket of a typical union worker is going to be more welfare enhancing than that additional dollar in the pocket of the typical owner. This is from just basic diminishing marginal utility of the dollar.
Remarkably few people seem to truly understand what "marginal propensity to consume" actually means.
Economically, money saved is money lost. Money invested is a promise of debt. Consumption is what drives the economy. That's why the poor and middle class are so important. Without them having enough money, the economics of scale... don't scale.
I'll admit while I'm inclined to believe that it's better to distribute money to workers rather than investors, I don't understand the economic mechanics that makes this true.
I do understand that the rich aren't gong to spend as much as the middle and lower classes, but I don't have a good answer for the predictable trickle-down rebuttal: the wealthy will invest rather than spend, and that investment funds jobs which put money in the pockets of the poor (but perhaps more so in the pockets of the rich?). You sort of touch on that: "consumption is what drives the economy", but I think the trickle-down economics folks would agree and argue that their job-creation-via-investment results in increased consumption? I have a headache.
> I'll admit while I'm inclined to believe that it's better to distribute money to workers rather than investors, I don't understand the economic mechanics that makes this true.
It's probably more true now than during most of history, but it's not always true.
It probably was true in the Reagan era that trickle-down "worked", because there was a lot of opportunity for large scale capital investment to improve the economy and make things people wanted (and provide jobs in the process). That doesn't seem as true now. Investors already have an excess amount of capital they don't know what to do with (and so are just doing things like buying houses en masse).
Consumption also funds jobs which put money in the pockets of the poor.
It has the added benefit of bidding up the price of things poor people need, which yes is inflationary but also incentivizes more resources being provisioned to help provide the things that poor people need.
I think OP made a correct argument that that we quickly make this right vs left without dissecting the actual impacts of workers unions. Your comment kind of demonstrates that.
> In terms of overall welfare
What is overall welfare ? If you are talking about society then we already know that free market competition leads to the best outcomes. If you are talking about welfare of specific group of people (at the expense of others) then you are right.
> I'm in favor of workers' ability to elect someone to represent them at the negotiation table (because that is what a union is).
I do not think anyone is opposed to that idea. It is covered under our freedom to form association. But in many cases unions are exact opposite of this. There is only one union which will negotiate on your behalf whether you like it or not and will actively prevent you from selecting someone else to negotiate on your behalf. In such cases workers are less free than before and it is much easier for the employer to get their way by just bribing the union leaders. (This is what happens in every single society where unions have collective bargaining rights.)
Employment is one of the most obvious, salient examples of market failure I can think of. Exploitative employers engineer situations where employees can't even use the job market, because they need a job and job-shopping (e.g. taking time off-call to do interviews) will lose them their job. Example: Arise Virtual Solutions[0].
If that's not a good enough example? See the gig economy. Companies taking over a service sector “with an app”, at a loss (using investor money), then squeezing the money back out of employees (e.g. by misclassifying them, not telling them how much each gig pays, programming virtual micromanagers to work them to the point of health problems in the name of “efficiency”). To use your words:
> If you are talking about welfare of specific group of people (at the expense of others) then you are right.
> If you are talking about society then we already know that free market competition leads to the best outcomes.
It's easy to find lump sum transfers that would be welfare enhancing over the pareto optimal outcome decided by the market.
> There is only one union which will negotiate on your behalf whether you like it or not and will actively prevent you from selecting someone else to negotiate on your behalf.
Well yes, you are beholden to the results of the election - even if the side you voted for didn't win. That is what worker self-determination is all about.
> it is much easier for the employer to get their way by just bribing the union leaders
Then why don't employers bring in unions more often?
Doesn’t have to be one bad person… a union as you say is still self-centered. Since they are an effective monopoly on workers, they can get pretty powerful and thus one-sided in interest seeking.
> In terms of overall welfare, an additional dollar in the pocket of a typical union worker is going to be more welfare enhancing than that additional dollar in the pocket of the typical owner.
Maybe, but printing a dollar and giving it to a union worker causes worse inflation than printing a dollar and giving it to an owner.
Unions are simply businesses that make labor available to companies. Any notion that they are something different from a business is mistaken. Attempts by unions to use government to make themselves legal monopolies are just as bad as any other business using government to do that.
In an employee owned corporation, you would get some say in leadership. Although it's possible that in a large enough corporation, it would be an indirect democracy. You vote for board members who vote for the company leadership.
While various municipalities and nations might classify co-ops as corporations legal wise, I don’t think the average person jumps to thinking of a co-op when you say corporation
You're always free to invest directly in your parent company. Shareholders hold tremendous power over company management, and that power increases the more you invest in the company. This gives large or organized shareholders at least as much democratic power as union members have over their entrenched leaders. Your question made it seem as though you didn't understand that.
Right to association is a fundamental American value something that American conservatives must value and something that Libertarians have always valued.
There is no argument that employees should have the right to form an association. The problems arise when such associations get "special privileges" that an average worker does not. Both L and R talk a lot about "equality of law" but happily shred that principle when it comes to their own voter groups.
Nearly all the evil (as you describe it) caused by unions is eventually due to the collective bargaining rights and other privileges.
In the words of Milton Friedman, unions do not protect workers. The competition protects workers. Market competition is the biggest rival to unions and hence unions will go to extreme lengths to prevent this sort of competition to keep themselves relevant. This does immense harm to workers as well as society in the long term. Folks like me who have seen extreme violence unleashed by workers unions end up despising very notion of unions for the same reason.
Unions are distributional coalitions. They try to allocate more resources to their members than they would receive otherwise. The source for this surplus is the rest of society. In other words, they are cartels. It should not be surprising that some of them are managed by organised crime.
Be it through negotiating salaries or restricting the number of doctors or enforcing very difficult admission procedures for lawyers.
They tend to also effect other, non-zero-sum game advantages, or otherwise they would probably be outlawed, but this is the gist of it. You can still acknowledge that many were founded with good intentions, but people who do not see at least some downsides have a severe reasoning defect.
Not only that, but it's really difficult to get the service line replaced even if you're willing to pay for it.
We went through the exercise a few years ago. It can be difficult to find a plumbing service willing to do this kind of work because not only do they need a special certification (makes sense) but the company has to put up something like a $5000 bond on their work with the city.
On top of that replacing the portion of the line that goes from the shutoff to the main requires digging up the street, so it can only be done if your street is not currently on a "moratorium" because it was recently repaved. Finally, the city charges a significant amount in permitting fees before you even get to paying for the plumbing service, roadwork repair and landscaping.
We finally gave up on that project and given the relatively low level leeching into our water just decided that we could live with using water filters specifically designed to remove lead for any water that our kids drink / cook with.
If Chicago was really serious about tackling this they could start with waiving permitting fees and bond requirements and streamline the process for managing the part of the process that occurs on city property. That'd at least make replacing these more tractable during a remodel.
IIRC the level after running the water for 5 min in the morning was around 1 PPB, so not high enough to freak out about, but not zero. I just generally assume that I should not give my kids water straight from the tap, because the level _could_ spike for various reasons like them working on the water main, etc.
As someone else pointed out, Chicago has made some changes here - and they plan to eventually remove all service lines. That said - this is Chicago. The mayor had a goal to remove 650 lines this year and there was a story in the Chicago Tribune recently that so far that number is ... 3. For context there are ~400k lines to replace.
The OP mentioned that this was a few years ago. Things are different now. Literally one month ago Illinois became the second state to legally require all lead pipes to be replaced [1]. I do believe that the Chicago city ordinance of last year waives all permitting fees now. I am not sure how it is going to be paid for: public money? homeowner pays?
It seems like the lead blood level indicator has been removed from this site, but a friend showed me this map of homicide rates vs one with lead levels from 18 years prior[0] and there was a pretty strong correlation.
Obviously there are confounders, but Kevin Drum’s decade old article positing that lead was a major contributor to the crime wave and subsequent reduction is pretty compelling. [1]
EDIT: aside, but maybe one of the most depressing things I’ve ever learned is the high levels of lead in the ink used to wrap various Mexican candy. [2] and this 2014 article [3] on lead levels in Mexican kids where the mean levels exceed the upper acceptable level in the US.
There are few things that cause me more distress than the failure to comprehensively tackle this issue worldwide.
“Our results indicate that more than 15% of the population will experience a decrement of more than 5 IQ points from lead exposure. The analysis also leads us to believe that lead is responsible for 820,000 disability-adjusted life-years for lead-induced mild mental retardation for children aged 0 to 4 years.”
Isn't it possible that places that are too poor to reliably remove potential lead exposure from their environment are also poor enough to attract crime in general?
This makes the assumption that poorness and crime are correlated, which I recently learned is not a universal truth.
I think it is a universal truth if crime offers more opportunities than honest work. But if everyone is dirt poor, there are also few opportunities for crime. You need a certain level of inequality because crime needs victims. Not much profit from steeling some cow from a poor farmer.
None of them suffer from this problem. Almost all of the charts aren't even density maps, and of the two that are, they are charting family income vs. soil lead level, which wouldn't suffer from the problem mentioned in the comic.
While never "safe", lead pipes were relatively safer before the epa started pushing chlorine alternatives.
High concentration chlorine (and flouride, where used) were reactive to contaminants such that they were often chemically/ electrically attracted to the lead pipes (clay soil and other environmental factors played a role), and the pipes leeched contaminants from the water. Lower concentrations of chlorine and any concentration of most chlorine-alternatives not only allow water to leech from the lead pipes, but it also can reverse the previous process, such that decades of leeched chemicals and contaminants deposited in/on the lead (and other) pipes are released back into the water, at a much higher rate and concentration.
Washington DC went through this issue [0] in what was a huge public embarrassment, at least within the civil engineering community. It left the EPA with a black eye in what was supposed to be a landmark and example-setting project.
Now that it's known to happen, better precautions can be taken, but it's absolutely still an issue, especially in places like Detroit, where the surviving lead pipes were largely the service lines on the user side of the water meter. (Remediation and upgrades to water distribution systems often stops at the meter, including design considerations.)
A couple years ago we had a pipe in our courtyard, buried at about 1.5m depth, burst in the middle of a cold spell. Suddenly an icy river appeared in the middle of our yard. Fixing it took a crew of four guys several hours to manually dig a grave-sized pit and splice out the bad section (my hat is still off to them -- it was well below freezing when it happened).
I still have the 7" (18cm) section of pipe they removed -- it's an impressively heavy, several pounds at least. There is an absolutely seriously huge amount of lead in just about everyone's yards here in Chicago, in the form of pipes.
What's less clear is how much of that lead winds up in bodies, to what resulting health impact. People need help making judgements about relative risk -- sadly, the article is not helpful in that regard.
My wife and I are particularly concerned about lead, especially since there is no way to really cure lead poisoning. Any house built before the 1980s could have lead in it, with varying degrees of concern for children. Around the home here is what we found are sources of lead to worry about (or not):
- Paint: lead was banned in paint in 1979, but lead was used less and less even before the cutoff date. Paint is especially a problem when it is chipping or wearing off, like on windows or doors.
- Plumbing. Very old homes may have lead pipes which should be removed. Lead solder was used with copper pipes until ~1984, but this is somewhat less of a concern, depending on your water source (cities can change the water to leach less lead from pipes).
- Plumbing fixtures: this is actually a pretty major source of lead in water, and luckily it is easy to change old faucets. You can run water for a minute to mitigate risk with old faucets.
- Flooring: Lead can be in any ceramic tiles, but generally not too much. It is only a problem if you are removing tiles and are creating lots of dust.
For plumbing, they switched to "lead-free" pipes, which is rather misleading as "lead-free" means up to 8% lead. It wasn't until 2011 that they redefined "lead-free" as being no more than 0.25% lead.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/09/01/2020-16...
That's absurd. How did they not run afoul of false advertising laws?
(Oh, that federalregister.gov link says "The RLDWA revised the definition of lead free.")
My layperson expectations:
• "low-X": < 1/3 is X.
• "trace amounts of X": <1% is X.
• "X-free": no reasonably detectable amount is X. Obviously there's some wiggle room for how sensitive the detectors are, but it should be less that "trace amounts," i.e. 0%.
This reminds me of "waterproof" which generally just means it can survive being splashed or rained on for a few minutes, but not submerged.
In South King County and Pierce County, WA (south of Seattle), the basic advice is to not grow any food directly in the ground without having your soil tested first for arsenic. There was a copper smelter in Tacoma for decades, and now everything basically within a 20 mile radius is contaminated.
The point is, there was a lot of nasty industrial activity in this country pre Clean Air Act. Everyone should be concerned and get their property tested IMO, especially if you have kids. I'm not trying to be alarmist; it doesn't affect my day to day life, it's just something to know. I still grow veggies in my garden, I just use raised beds and dirt from bags from Home Depot.
Among other things (including a nuclear meltdown):
> On 11 December 2002, a Department of Energy (DOE) official, Mike Lopez, described typical clean-up procedures executed by Field Lab employees in the past. Workers would dispose of barrels filled with highly toxic waste by shooting the barrels with rifles so that they would explode and release their contents into the air. It is unclear when this process ended, but for certain did end prior to the 1990s.[29]
I grew up on a farm where the property has since been divided up and houses built. I remember how my parents were about gasoline for washing paint brushes and old motor oil for painting fences and burning plastics and electronics in the burn barrel. Who knows what happened to pesticide containers. There was a stack of lead pipes I played with occasionally. No idea what pipes were in the house, but it was old, so.
And I totally wonder whether people are growing food there, soaking all of that up.
I found that my backyard soil has very low lead levels from the UMass Soil & Plant Nutrient Testing Laboratory. You can test your soil lead levels, along with nutrient contents of your soil as it pertains to the types of plants you have by sending a sample and $20 to UMass: https://ag.umass.edu/services/soil-plant-nutrient-testing-la...
I just found that the University of New Hampshire offers a similar test with an additional heavy metals package available which covers cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, nickel & zinc: https://extension.unh.edu/resource/soil-testing-forms
UK suburban soil can also be bad as people used to throw fireplace ashes in their gardens, which can concentrate contaminants. I ate from my home allotment for years until a neighbour told me he had recently tested his soil and found it heavy with lead and other rubbish.
For plumbing specifically you _also_ have to worry about every link in the chain from your house to the water source. Perhaps non-intuitively just knowing if there are lead pipes because they can develop a protective sediment layer that prevents the lead from touching the water.
Anecdotally, we had a major city water line project in our neighborhood that _raised_ our lead levels because it disturbed that sediment protection.
The only real solution is testing and filtering at point of use. But even filtering is hard because most water filters sold are for flavor not for lead.
The right solution is installing a reverse osmosis filter system (which includes mechanical and charcoal filters) at the house or tap level. Water's not one of those things people should cheap out on. We, as a society, can afford to not have this be an issue. We're not quite to that realization yet.
To be clear: I'm not saying the burden of cost should be solely put on renters/homeowners.
Can you go into this in a bit of detail? I thought reverse osmosis water wasn't great to drink, because it's essentially de-ionized water. So, the water has no choice but to rip ions out of your cells. But, I've never looked into biology enough to understand.
I did work in a lab back in the day where one of the students was filling his water bottle from the DI tap, because he preferred the taste. He didn't drop dead or anything.
I clearly have just enough of the details to not understand.
I'm specious that any sediment/crust that formed in an old water system may contain very high levels of lead. I think that may be what happened in Flint MI. Changed the PH of the water and all that lead started leaching back into the water.
Other hazards in flooring include asbestos. In general, flooring tiles installed between 1920 and 1980 (in the US at least) can contain asbestos, in particular (but not limited to 9x9 tiles).
We have an early 20th century house and run them over anything we're about to demo. So far we've been lucky, so likely a later renovation removed most of the lead that would have been there.
Not a doctor, but my understanding is that low levels of lead are most impactful on children. Using chelation on adults with low levels of lead may create more problems than it solves.
No, a lot of PVC wire insulation contains no lead. For example, all wire meant to be sold in the EU must be ROHS complaint, and thus contain no lead. Many US manufacturers are also compliant, and the number is growing. Many manufacturers state this explicitly on their websites (e.g. Tripp Lite and Southwire, to take two random examples). Many others can be identified by either an RoHS designation or lack of CA Prop 65 warning for lead.
The answer to your second question is yes, handling cords with heavily leaded insulation can cause significant amounts of lead to rub off on your hands. This is easily seen with a Lead-Check swab, which will turn red when wiped either on the cord, or even on your fingers after you've spent some time handling the cord.
> all wire meant to be sold in the EU must be ROHS complaint
Just an aside, this is a personal gripe. I grew up on lead solder, making Heathkit projects with my dad.
I tried re-engaging with the electronics hobby as an adult, decades later, in a world filled with ROHS solder, and I have to say it is a huge pain in the ass to work with. Adhesion, balling issues, etc, regardless of core type, flux, etc, even on nice controlled-temp Hakko stations, versus the Weller crap irons of my youth.
Maybe I'm just a grumpy old man, or maybe my memories are covered with rose glasses. But electronics seemed be more enjoyable in the lead era. And to my knowledge, my IQ did not suffer.
I suspect the opposite. I grew up eating off of lead-contaminated Lenox dishes, playing with fishing weights and mercury from broken thermostats, and other stimulating but toxic activities. I strongly suspect these things account for at least some of the attention deficit and impulse control issues I now struggle with as an adult.
I'm sure your IQ is more than adequate, but you have no way of knowing what it would be if your brain was kept cleaner in your youth. For my part, I'd love to be smarter.
You can't get lead poisoning from using lead solder. The melting point is not high enough to turn the lead into a gas. In fact, lead free solders are generally more harmful - due to higher melting points they tend to produce a lot more flux fumes. ROHS solder was introduced so when you junk your mass produced electrical appliance, you're not adding more lead to the environment. For hobbyists it makes no sense.
> Sources outside the home include avgas which is the largest source for lead in the atmosphere
In the atmosphere, sure (as it is not naturally occurring in the air). But how large is this source? And what harm does it actually cause?
There are indications that the levels of lead around airports are very low - even the article linked said that ~2.5% of children around the airport had "detectable" levels of lead. But it doesn't provide enough data to tell if the contamination came from the air. If this was significant, wouldn't many more children around the airport have high (not only detectable) levels of lead? Everyone has to breathe, but not everyone has the same contamination sources.
From Wikipedia:
> Final results from EPA's lead modeling study at the Santa Monica Airport shows off-airport levels below current 150 ng/m3 and possible future 20 ng/m3 levels.[108] Fifteen of 17 airports monitored during a year-long study in the US by the EPA have lead emissions well below the current National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for lead.[109]
To be safe, obviously we want to reduce all exposure to zero.
Avgas was changed in formulation to reduce lead.
There are alternatives to avgas - in Europe, avgas is already hard to find. Automotive gasoline conversions are available for some widely used engines. The problem is that you can't just take it to a shop and covert it - the airplane was originally certified with one engine type. If it is changed, it is no longer certified. No company is willing to eat the costs to re-certify - for the planes that are still in production. Let alone planes made by companies that no longer exist.
In the 'experimental' category, there are many types of engines that can directly burn either avgas or "mogas".
Some manufacturers, like Diamond, can use "jet fuel" (essentially, diesel) in their piston engines (as they have their own engines, based on diesel car engines). But even they will have avgas-burning versions (with Lycoming engines) for the US market.
Then you have competing agencies dragging their feet. There's the EPA, which should be issuing regulations. Then there's the FAA that needs to come up with a solution with the certification issue - they are pretty underfunded so it's unlikely they will. One agency points the finger to the other, none take action. I'm probably missing other agencies. There are alternatives in development - without a full government push, progress is slow.
Meanwhile, planes (and many helicopters) in the US keep spewing lead. Many of which provide important services.
IQ damage of any amount is extremely significant and has subtle effects on society which are difficult to economically quantify, and given that many avgas burners basically do it for fun, seems mostly unjustifiable.
> most of the affected kids ... didn’t have enormous amounts of lead in their bloodstreams, and only two percent had a "high" level. But as the researchers note in their paper, there's no such thing as a safe amount of lead to have in your system.
It's possible that more sensitive instruments will allow us to eventually conclude "this small amount X of lead is safe to have ...". But it makes sense to take this seriously. We know lead is bad and we know lots of environmental exposure to lead exists.
I might be mistaken here, but from what I've read on lead, we already know relatively well what amount of lead is safe, according to body weight etc. We also know that our bodies can deal with these small amounts, by actually getting rid of some of it. Maybe someone with more knowledge on the matter can chime in?
My understanding is that all detectable amounts currently have known negative effects when studied. The Action levels are set based on what is possible to address in an individual child.
Lead exists in the environment. It would be impractical to impossible to eliminate it entirely from the blood streams of most people. However certain areas have extremely dangerous concentrations such as dirt near major roads/old buildings, water in certain areas, and lead paints.
Lead pipes are an interesting one where it is simply impractical to replace all the pipes and remove lead in old cities. Hence as long as the calcification holds there is no action on the small amount of lead which leaks into the pipes.
Actually, you dont need to replace the pipes. They can actually line them in place. Of course then people might have concerns about the chemical makeup of the liners (basically plastic), but it's hard to say what other alternatives are out there.
That statement has the exact same problem. With sufficiently sensitive tests you might in theory be able to detect the negative effects of a single lead atom.
What we really want to know is: how big of a deal is this really?
There are unlikely to be people in the US with blood levels less than 1 order of magnitude less than the EPA action threshold. Lead is in your drinking water, food, and if you lived near anything with leaded - your air.
We used to use lead based pesticides at the dawn of the 20th century, if you eat any food grown in the midwest you are exposing yourself to reasonably large quantities of lead.
In the US at least, were it structured as an infrastructure project on a city by city basis, it would actually be extremely possible to strip out lead pipes and replace them with something modern.
The problem is that pipe ownership in a domestic home is the property of the homeowner, and there's no political will to do that kind of massive wealth transfer from the public coffers to the improved infrastructure of millions of individual properties. But while it wouldn't be inexpensive, it's on par with other expenditures the federal government makes for federal projects.
Total lead tells you your symptoms today. But it accrues so you'd need to know in advance your future lead intake to know if this small amount today will be a big impact tomorrow. Basically its unknowable so its practical to say that no amount is safe. There probably does exist a low enough level that the body can even clear it but there isn't any will to define it.
So, I'd agree that there are lead levels too low to be worth worrying about. But I recall a clever study a while back where a researcher noticed that children found to be in the top decile of lead exposure got lead abatement for their homes or apartments by the city. The researchers compared them to the previous second decile (now first decile) and found a pretty significant effect size on life outcomes. This was done on poor people in city centers so the lead levels were high compared to, say, suburbanites but there are lead levels many kids in the US are exposed to that are actually a big deal.
* 50.5% had "detectable" levels (50.4%-50.6% for the 95% CI).
* 1.9% had "elevated" levels (1.8%-1.9% for the 95% CI [wait, how is the reported amount the same as the upper limit of the CI?]).
The paper does start out saying:
> No safe level of exposure to lead has been identified.
Which I believe to be true, though it's not the same as "no level of exposure to lead is safe". I would be interested in what levels are known to be unsafe. Is 1.0 μg/dL known to be unsafe, or just not known to be safe?
It's pretty clear we should be working to reduce lead exposure, especially in children, but it's also true that "detectable amounts" and "harmful" aren't the same thing. The former clearly varies with our technology and the other remains constant (and isn't, afaik, known to be 0).
I'm curious. If there's lead in the water, the air, the soil, the food we eat, is zero even possible? Is there a baseline "side effect of living on Earth" level, even if it's very slight?
The death rate of being human is 100%. Every five minutes there's some new paper or study letting us all know why we should be afraid of something new.
I'm not saying this particular study is necessarily scare-mongering, but good grief is it tiring to see this stuff all day every day, without any scale of risk for context.
Is your implication that we can find every single element in the periodic table (if not compounds and other chemicals, too) in the human body with sufficiently sensitive testing?
More or less. I used to run samples of water from student’s canteens on a Thermo Scientific Element 2 (an exquisitely sensitive mass spectrometer) in their presence, knowing I would find uranium and lead in it. Not a lot, but it’s there. The point to the students was the dose makes the poison, more or less.
The human body contains something like 10^27 atoms. It doesn't seem that unreasonable that all elements which are at least moderately common on Earth would be present...
That's basically equivalent to just saying the human body contains atoms for all isotopes. And other than the unstable or exceedingly rare isotopes I don't see why not.
The number of possible chemicals is vast, due to the exponentially large number of ways you can combine the elements. So although every stable element is present in the average human, every possible chemical (or compound) is not.
My kid took a routine test and was found to have 5.0 μg/dL, which is elevated but not alarming. The source is most likely paint chips or dust. I'm in an old building which has lead paint that was painted over. It's totally legal to just paint over the lead paint, but since the building is settling the paint on the door frames often chips off.
My landlord has been good about offering to strip in repaint the frames, but I would rather not because I feel like all of the scraping would place even more lead chips and dust in the environment. I'd rather be diligent about cleaning and have them do that strip it after we move.
Sorry, but 5.0 μg/dL is actually pretty bad. This is the new threshold at which the CDC recommends intervention; it was dropped from 10 relatively recently.
If done right the stripping will absolutely be the right move. Cleaning will only get you so far. Your state should have licensed lead remediation contractors
Nobody wants to pay to do it right though. So they often just throw on a 3M mask, put up some air filters, and call it good enough. To do it the EPA-approved way can easily cost $10K with an unlimited ceiling.
I'm of the maybe controversial opinion that there should be a program to help residential users with the costs, because the reality is that when the costs are too high (even if for good reason) many just do it wrong, and make the contamination worse.
There's absolutely funding to do this in some areas. Cleveland's had a major remediation going on for years now because approximately everyone who lives in the city is too poor to pay for it. At the same time, most houses are much older than 1979, so nearly every house has some.
5 μg/dL is very alarming. It is associated with an order of magnitude higher criminal behavior in later life, much higher odds of repeating a grade in school, and significantly worse 3rd and 5th grade reading and math performance. Children with this blood lead level have worse later-life outcomes than children who test with 10 μg/dL and get treatment for it.
This article is pretty bad, for all the usual clickbaity reasons. It's worth at least scanning the study they're citing, which is (even as a layman) pretty easy to read.[1]
How big a concern is lead in adults, and is there anything that can be done about long run exposure to lower levels?
I live in Montreal, and found out the city pipes in my area had lead. So I've been drinking it about ten years; have bottled water now.
My understanding is that chelation is good for acute exposure but wasn't sure it's recommended for lower levels. Now do I know if this is actually something to be concerned about, at low levels in an adult.
I had the city worker do a measure without flushing: 16 ug/L
(I drink bottled water now so there's no ongoing exposure. I also can't be sure my old places had it, so it could have just been for two years that I was exposed, but likely was for ten)
Bottled water often comes from the same sources as your tap, so the "no ongoing exposure" is not always guaranteed. Additionally, bottled water companies (at least in the states) is not regulated by the same laws as municipal/city water companies.
That varies by area. This is Eska water, from an esker in the north of quebec. It doesn't have lead pipes. The lead in Montreal's water comes from old city pipes.
Aviation fuel is a far smaller source of lead in humans than just about anything else since it's mostly thinly distributed thousands of feet away from them (contrast with paint, handling of lead objects, plumbing, etc).
I don't find anything disagreeable about the EPA refraining from spending my taxes on low impact things to appease people who just want to see a feel good message be sent.
The city of San Jose is forcing a local airport to close largely over lead concerns. However research has shown that children living near the airport don't actually have higher blood lead levels.
Although the absolute risk is probably small the aviation industry should have moved faster on this issue. Airplanes last longer than cars but they can't expect the status quo to be tolerated indefinitely. At some point airplane owners need to be forced to upgrade their engines, or quit flying.
> At some point airplane owners need to be forced to upgrade their engines, or quit flying.
It's not about the owners, at all. Airplanes already have a limit on how many hours their engines have, after that it needs to be overhauled or replaced.
It's just that, for many planes, there aren't really any options available, as other engines are not certified for their planes.
Even for the planes that _are_ certified and can be changed to use other fuels, most airports don't have them available (even "mogas", which is automotive gasoline with no ethanol, is difficult to find).
The county of Santa Clara, which owns the airport, is closing it because it is an uneconomical waste of a huge amount of phenomenally valuable land, and it is only 5 miles from a real airport. It serves no legitimate purpose in the society and economy of the Bay Area.
> The county of Santa Clara, which owns the airport, is closing it because it is an uneconomical waste of a huge amount of phenomenally valuable land, and it is only 5 miles from a real airport. It serves no legitimate purpose in the society and economy of the Bay Area.
That is false. It is a "relief" airport precisely because it is close to SJC. That allows slower traffic to land in RHRV instead of SJC. It is a real airport. Has two runways, air traffic control and what have you. What's the threshold for a 'real airport'?
There's a lot of "phenomenally valuable" land nearby with only dirt and maybe trees growing on it. There are parks and wilderness areas. Should we turn them into businesses and houses just because real state values are up?
It's not a real airport because 100% of its operations are wankers flying around in their obsolete mosquitos. The Bay Area has a superabundance of GA airports and RHV is superfluous.
And most pilot will have touched this fuel quite a bit - for example when checking a single engine propeller plane during preflight we sump the fuel tanks. There is always some fuel that sprays onto my hands then.
I wonder how much lead this exposes me to. (I'm working on a private pilot license in a Cessna 172)
I just got my test results back, since I'm having some odd symptoms and my doctor's kinda throwing ideas at the wall. He asked, jokingly, if there was a chance anyone was trying to poison me with arsenic.
I said no, but I do a lot of soldering (like a LOT), and I make a point not to chew on my solder or wear the iron behind my ear like a pencil, but who knows whether the dust is getting absorbed or whatever. What the heck, let's check for it.
My level came back at "less than 1" µg/dl, which I guess is as far down as that particular measurement can go. So that's cool, seems my precautions are adequate.
I switched to using a GATTS jar (which also helps detect Jet-A contamination, which is not much of a concern for a 172). The design of that jar is such that much less fuel (often zero) touches/splashes onto your hands and it's easy to pour the fuel back into the tank if the sample is "clean".
If you are particularly concerned (could be justified) you could get a small aircraft with a diesel engine, don't seem super common but might be increasing.
My house was built in the 70s and I've tested surfaces over the years and have not found any lead paint yet. Another source of lead, unfortunately, is in children's toys.
Smaller general aviation aircraft still use 100LL gasoline (the LL stands for low lead) - and even though there’s lead-free replacement candidates (still going through regulatory approval, at least in the US), it’s been known that areas around airports with frequent GA traffic have higher levels of lead in the air, and children living near said airports may have elevated levels of lead in their blood (https://paloaltoonline.com/news/2021/08/06/new-study-finds-l...)
>and children living near said airports may have elevated levels of lead in their blood
Or is that because the upper middle class types avoid airport noise like the plague leaving the housing stock around airports cheaper, older and more leaded?
The correlation between low income and lead (all known bad chemicals highly used in the past really) exposure is well studied rather than speculative.
Lead doesn't absorb through the skin. You have to breathe or eat it. As long as you thoroughly wash your hands after preflight, the only exposure should be the fumes and exhaust in the air.
With almost no exceptions, pilots have exactly zero say in what fuel to use. Airplanes are certified to use certain fuels and that's what you have to use. At this point there is no generally approved unleaded replacement for 100-octane avgas (although several are in testing.)
A few engines, mostly low performance ones, have the option to use automobile gas, but even in those cases it's rarely available at airports so it's not really an option either.
Without a legal replacement fuel (which is now in the works, but still not generally available nor legally approved for most aircraft), incentive isn't enough.
Modern mass-market electronics have been made with lead-free solder for a long time because of RoHS regulations (I believe this is an EU thing but most manufacturers have retooled everything to be lead-free). I'd argue that electronics solder is a lot less of a concern anyway since it's usually only in hard-to-reach places. It's a major concern for disposal, however.
In the course of regular pediatric visits the doctor should at some point check the blood for lead early on. Not on every visit, of course, they have a schedule for the blood work.
As for the concerns, if there're reasons, doctor recommened us to check the water first. There may also be free test kits from the city.
Also, out of caution, we were running the water off for some time before filling pots and doing washes, esp. in the morning.
Dust wise, there's no easy solution. The wet cleaning, mopping the floors regularly and maintaining reasonable humidity indoors would help keep dust down... but babies love to crawl.
Perhaps being outdoors more may be an option, unless it's even more polluted.
Old stuff has lead, but also has a bunch of other things that are of dubious health effects.
But new stuff contains more volatiles, more fluorinated plastics, and a far wider array of newish chemicals we don't yet have good data on (nanoparticles etc.)
Overall, I'd say that unless you have a lifetime to test and research everything, it probably isn't worth making any lifestyle choices to avoid unhealthy materials, because in doing so there's a good chance you'll just switch to another. But you should ask your government to put more money into population wide health initiatives, like research into health effects of chemicals.
Or avoid anything that wasn't made the same way 400 years ago. ;-)
Except pewter. Avoid that.
But like -- wood, cast iron, earthenware, unleaded glass, natural fibers (cotton, linen, hemp), vegetable dyes: I don't see how you go wrong with those.
Lead paint is still occasionally found on toys imported from China. But after a previous recall incident the major US toy brands now have better control over their supply chains so the risk should be low.
Watch out for dishes, especially older ones. The older Lenox dishes my family used for 40 years turned out to have heavily leaded glaze on the surface. By the time I was using them for my own kids, the glaze could turn a lead-check swab bright red, which means we were eating that lead.
After I discovered this I replaced all of our dishes with plain white Corelle. Corelle currently uses lead-free glaze; the plain white is just me being an absolutist.
Note that vintage Corelle and almost all other vintage cookware contains some amount of lead in the decorative glaze.
Here's a good resource for lead content in the household items your kids are likely to encounter:
I stripped some woodwork in an 18th century house that had been painted over numerous times. I didn't bother to test, I just assumed that at least some of those layers were lead. The options for removal and disposal are limited and nasty.
The problem with looking at things this way is that there is no discussion of amounts and dose-dependent effects. The article just says "For lead there's no 'too low'". and "we want zero." Fine enough, but as we are very good at measuring ever-smaller quantities of things we will find all manner of out-of-place chemicals that we have been tolerating just fine. I'm sure I have measurable amounts of arsenic, lead, aluminum, chlorine, radioactivity, etc in my body right now, in levels that do not have a meaningful impact on my health.
The real question we should ask is whether there is substantial evidence of a negative health impact from the levels of lead that are measured.
We should want to know exactly what levels were measured in these kids and be able to plot it out. We should have some idea of the health impacts of various doses. With that we could come to more meaningful conclusions.
"Although these combined studies highlight the possibility of uptake and translocation of micro- and nanoplastics into the human body following oral and inhalation exposure, there is an overall scarcity of studies that conscientiously and systematically investigated the extent of particle translocation to different organs in relation to particle dose and particle size. Moreover, the potential health risks resulting from micro- and nanoplastics exposure, uptake and translocation is poorly investigated and is an important matter of ongoing debate."
"...linked to poverty — especially old housing in underserved communities."
It's always the same story. #blacklivesmatter should also become an environmental and rapid climate change movement. Most oft those paying the price, for what mostly rich white men do to our planet, are people of color.
If you are interested in lead exposure as a global problem, I recommend the "There's Lead in your Turmeric" episode of The Weeds podcast. Some of the largest sources of lead are adulterated turmeric, improperly fired pottery, and others that I never would have expected.
The important question is how many kids have 5 micrograms of lead per decaliter of blood [0]. This is the reference blood lead level and much more useful for tracking progress (or decline).
I’m surprised that the article sticks with the “no lead is good” rather than the public health level.
The link that you posted mentions 5 migrograms per deciliter of blood, while your post mentions 5 micrograms per decaliter of blood. This is a 100 fold misstatement.
A deciliter of blood is 1/10 of a liter, while a decaliter is 10 liters. For reference, I believe that the average adult male has roughly 10L of blood, so 5 micrograms per decaliter would be 5 micrograms in the body of an adult, whereas 5 micrograms per deciliter would be probably something like 5 micrograms in a baby. I don't necessarily trust this site (https://www.healthline.com/health/how-much-blood-in-human-bo...), but it says that babies have ~75 mL (0.075L, or 0.75dL) while the average adult has 4500 - 5700 mL of blood (4.5-5.7L, or 45-57dL, or 0.45-0.57DL).
I'm also surprised that the article sticks with their "no lead is good" posture.
My dad was a civil engineer on the clean water side of public health. In the late 1970s, when my parents moved into the house I grew up in, he replaced the supply line to the street and most of the plumbing. We never talked to him about it, but lead seems like a good guess (a side benefit, the water pressure from a slightly larger meter and clean pipes is a wonderful thing).
Roofers weld lead and breathe in some of the fumes here in UK. I thought perhaps they ought to carry portable fans to improve ventilation on calm days.
Take your pick. If exposed during childhood it results in essentially mental retardation and impulse issues. The thought is this led to more issues with crime.
I was diagnosed w/ ADHD in 2019. When doing research and seeing what the causes could be -- I noticed that lead paint was among possible contributors. I decided to google what lead paint looked like, and realized the apartment I was raised in was covered in it.
If you go to here to the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/boysbookofindust00noyc and view or download the book titled The boy's book of industrial information by Elisha Noyce published in 1858 — note I said 1858 - 163 years ago — and then turn to (book page 58, not the PDF #) then on the topic of WHITE LEAD you'll read this amazing statement:
"White lead is a very poisonous substance, and produces the disease called painters' colic, when taken into the system in minute quantities and for a long time, so that all who have much to do with this dangerous substance, as house-painters and artists, should be extremely careful that their hands are well washed frequently, and especially before going to meals. Cisterns of lead, used for containing water, very soon become coated inside with a thin flim (sic) of sulphate of lead, this prevents the water from acting further on the lead, and the water from such cisterns is never found to be poisonous; but, if distilled water were used, it would act rapidly on the lead, corroding it, and causing a deposit in the water of white lead, which would render such water dangerous in the extreme."
Remember this book was written for the information of boys; it wasn't in a new learned research paper from the Royal Society, etc. which means that 163 years ago it was very common knowledge that lead was very toxic. So how the fuck did we get to the point where we let the likes of Thomas Midgley Jr. and Big Industry introduce tetraethyllead - leaded gasoline ca 1923 and then pollute the world for another 70 or so years? Why weren't there more stringent regulations on white lead in paints, especially during its removal (somewhat like the asbestos regulations of today)? I acknowledge that avoiding lead in paint until about the mid 20th Century would have been difficult but at least some attempt to reduce its spread much earlier than when it was removed from paint should have been undertaken.
This is the same old story with industry doing its thing and to hell with the consequences. Lead was known to be dangerous in Roman times, so was mercury and asbestos and some 2000 years later we're still cursed with the mismanagement of these dangerous substance. Moreover, it doesn't stop there, we knew cigarettes and tobacco were dangerous long before the 1950s and see the fight we had over that. ...And there are many more such examples without even having to look for them.
It's a never-ending battle with Big Industry, Monsanto, Bayer, etc, etc. I'm beginning to think it'll never end whilst we have the current political mindset.
BTW, there's some truth to the 'cisterns of lead' being less poisonous although that wouldn't be tolerated these days. Not that long ago I've stayed in houses with lead water pipes. As far as I know they've not been changed, so until recently it was a common practice to use lead for water distribution. However, note carefully Noyce's caveat about the type of water that should be stored within them.
Topics like this bring modern attitudes about identity to a tricky spot. A common view is that you aren't defined by XYZ, you can choose your identity and who you are or what you do. In reality, things like lead poisoning have a very powerful and undeniable impact on who you are and what you can do, e.g.
> Slow development of normal childhood behaviors, such as talking and use of words, and permanent intellectual disability are both commonly seen.
If lead is really a widespread problem, and especially if it continues worsening, then we'll eventually reach a point where we need to identify individuals who have been impacted by lead and ideally take pre-emptive measures to help them with the consequences of it.
This makes me wonder how people with more woke attitudes approach other group-specific issues like sickle cell anemia in black people or myopia in Asian and Jewish people. In these cases, being XYZ does define you and the things you're at risk for.
This is extremely broad and it feels like a bit of a strawman - a classic feminist issue I've heard is how office chairs are often designed more for the average height of a man, therefore subtly excluding women from the workspace.
"people with more woke attitudes" would absolutely be on board with measures such as ensuring Asian people get the eye care they need (I suspect).
I can't speak for the "woke" in general, but regarding medical conditions and their prevalence depending on racial origin: there's worlds of difference between defining what credit risk somebody is based on their skin color and informing people that skin color may be a correlative indicator that the resources should be invested to test their genetics for known maladies. The first is a crime in the United States, and the second is just good medicine.
> that skin color may be a correlative indicator that the resources should be invested to test their genetics for known maladies
You're right, but people are still starting to call this racism. I've been in the meetings where HR hammered home the point, and I quote "race is a social construct with no biological meaning". And some our software is supposed to support medical fields :(
This is actually a great example of what I mean. It's not hard to see the conflict. Let's say the group most affected by lead in the US is green people, and that most green people have some level of significant lead poisoning. That would mean that it's very likely that green people in the US have negative impacts to their cognitive development because of this lead poisoning. So to address the issue green people are having would also mean acknowledging that as a group, green people are more likely to have developmental issues, which would then create fuel for discrimination against green people. That's what I mean, I'm curious to see how that kind of situation gets handled.
You would hope that such good medicine is possible, but thanks to woke insanity it's becoming untenable. Read the experiences of medical practitioners that show how bad it is getting:
I will say that, at least in the “woke” circles I notice, there is plenty of discussion about how medical knowledge is too centered around the white male. Finding studies that dig into the way race-specific biology should change medical treatment and risk factors is hard, and finding doctors who acknowledge those studies in how they think about patients is even harder.
In my experience it's even worse than being too centered around the white male, it's too centered on a fictional 'average' person and if you fall outside that you have to research and advocate for yourself. If I have to do that as a mildly neuro-divergent white male then people less privileged than I am must be in real trouble.
Money is an issue though. If you want to study how every disease affects neuro-divergent middle-child women of native american descent then the cost of doing research will sky rocket. Nothing would ever get done.
Scientifically speaking, there is no "race-specific biology". Race is a social construct. But there are ethnicities which get grouped into racial categories.
I agree with that in general, but there are issues that affect people who are more closely related along ethnic lines. The problem is the existing course racial groupings with arbitrary selections based on culture with no scientific basis.
You're going to have to elaborate for me. Given that certain races are genetically predisposed to certain diseases and conditions more than other races, how am I to make sense of your comment?
"If separate racial or ethnic groups actually existed, we would expect to find “trademark” alleles and other genetic features that are characteristic of a single group but not present in any others. However, the 2002 Stanford study found that only 7.4% of over 4000 alleles were specific to one geographical region. Furthermore, even when region-specific alleles did appear, they only occurred in about 1% of the people from that region—hardly enough to be any kind of trademark. Thus, there is no evidence that the groups we commonly call “races” have distinct, unifying genetic identities. In fact, there is ample variation within races (Figure 1B)."
Consider how many different ethnic groups have ancestry going back millenia on Africa, Europe and Asia, and all the differences between ethnic groups. Why is race primarily divided up based on skin tone instead of some other biological feature? What biological markers dictate the boundaries of racial categories? It can't be skin tone, because there are South Asians and Australians who have very dark skin. There are Southern Europeans who can be noticeably darker than some Middle Easterners and Northern Africans.
Where is the dividing line? Historically, it changes over time. If Irish, Italians and Eastern Europeans weren't considered white until sometime in the 20th century, then that shows that race is a cultural construct.
There is no strict dividing line due to gene flow as a result of gradual migration patterns over the last few thousand years.
However, the existence of a dividing line shouldn't be a requirement for a useful definition of race that admits the existence of average-level genetic differences; i.e. differences in gene frequency that lead to real and meaningful differences on average, that we can observe & that matter to real-world outcomes.
That quote you shared sets up an overly strict definition of "separate racial groups" that seems designed to guarantee the conclusion of "they don't exist". The sneaky word they've used is "separate", it's a rhetorical trick that allows them to unfairly use zero allele frequency as the requirement which is guaranteed not to be met even with very small amounts of gene flow.
> race primarily divided up based on skin tone
> race is a cultural construct.
I don't agree that race is (or at least, should be) primarily defined by skin color. Racists might do that, but I don't wish to argue their perspective with you, I am arguing my perspective.
Some groups of South East Asians share the same skin tone as Africans, but Africans have no Neanderthal ancestry and some of these South East Asian groups have high Denisovan ancenstry. These are genetic differences between these two groups that have the same skin tone.
Ashkenazi Jews and whites of European descent share the same skin color, but differ in certain genetic diseases that are more prevalent in one versus the other. These are genetic differences.
The existence of these average-level genetic differences is proof that race is not just a cultural construct, even if it is in part a cultural construct only insofar as it plays itself out in everyday perception and discourse.
> Topics like this bring modern attitudes about identity to a tricky spot.
Not only identity but if you follow this train of thought also criminal responsibility. If I'm not mistaken there is a well known correlation between (childhood) head trauma and serial killers. I remember a case where a guy suffered brain damage in a car accident as an adult, underwent a complete change of character and committed a murder thereafter (can't remember the name though).
These examples are extreme cases for sure, but the effect is much more subtle. There are studies showing that nutritious prison food leads to lower levels of violence etc.
People with "woke attitudes" aren't against group-specific issues. They're against using group-specific characteristics as a way to negatively discriminate against groups or individuals in that group.
==If lead is really a widespread problem, and especially if it continues worsening, then we'll eventually reach a point where we need to identify individuals who have been impacted by lead and ideally take pre-emptive measures to help them with the consequences of it.==
We can barely get the funding today to replace lead pipes, the bare minimum to try and limit exposure, I doubt we'll be tracking down individuals any time soon.
==how people with more woke attitudes approach other group-specific issues==
I think in this case "woke" people would try to understand and empathize with those "group-specific issues" and help develop and implement plans to solve those issues. I think we see this in the "woke" political parties leading the charge on "group-specific issues" like voting rights, indigenous rights, immigrant rights, women's reproductive rights, healthcare as a right, etc. Just look at the typical political affiliations of the three "groups" you mentioned. It might answer your question.
https://tamararubin.com/
I personally have used both XRF and swabs on various objects around by home, and I found some really scary shit. The scariest were the older Lenox dishes we used for years; the decorative glaze on the eating surface tested high in lead via XRF, and the swab lit up bright red which means that lead was also coming off in our food.
I threw away all our dishes and bought new Corelle.
Other problems I found include old electrical cords and things made out of brass, including all plumbing fittings made before about 2012. These will also turn a swab red, especially if there's any corrosion, which means the lead is mobile.