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Half of American kids have lead in their blood, doctors say

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Re: Half of American kids have lead in their blood, doctors say

#81

Post by willis936 »

kasey_junk wrote: post #77
roland35 wrote: post #15

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 espec…

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 pro…

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.

Re: Half of American kids have lead in their blood, doctors say

#82

Post by jmalicki »

dllthomas wrote: post #61
marcosdumay wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there's no science that says "one atom of lead anywhere in your body is bad", then saying "detectable" is meaningless. It would be meaningless on that case too. Also meaningless is saying that 2% of the kids have a high level of lead, without saying what "high" means.

> Also meaningless is saying that 2% of the kids have a high level of lead, without saying what "high" means. Oh, that's simple - it's defined as above the 98th percentile. (I kid, I hope...)

Actually, the CDC defines the 5ug/DL as high based on being the 97.5%ile [1] in children... so you're not kidding...

But if only 2% of children have lead levels that were originally defined based on the worst 2.5%, that's a 20% reduction, so great news!?

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/prevention/blood-lead-levels.h...

Re: Half of American kids have lead in their blood, doctors say

#83

Post by IdoRA »

silicon2401 wrote: post #23
refurb wrote: post #4

scientists saw observable levels of the toxic metal in about half As a former analytical chemist, we can detect most metals down to the parts per trillion or lower. So the more sensitive our instruments get the “more kids have lead”. With sufficiently sensitive testing you’d probably find lead in 100% of people.

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.

Re: Half of American kids have lead in their blood, doctors say

#84

Post by linuxguy2 »

krrrh wrote: post #78
djoldman wrote: post #44

How about Chicago: > 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…

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 mayb…

Beware density/heat maps that mostly just match population maps. Of course, xkcd has been there before: https://xkcd.com/1138/

Re: Half of American kids have lead in their blood, doctors say

#85

Post by calibas »

roland35 wrote: post #15

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 espec…

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...

Re: Half of American kids have lead in their blood, doctors say

#86

Post by floor2 »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #74
djoldman wrote: post #44

How about Chicago: > 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 o…

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

Re: Half of American kids have lead in their blood, doctors say

#87

Post by bpodgursky »

dj_gitmo wrote: post #36

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, bu…

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.

Re: Half of American kids have lead in their blood, doctors say

#88

Post by ryandrake »

s0rce wrote: post #73
verst wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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.

Or wear gloves during your preflight.
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