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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

#231

Post by jcrben »

outworlder wrote: post #185
jcrben wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sources outside the home include avgas which is the largest source for lead in the atmosphere https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...

> 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…

Well, this is an another estimate: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.6b02910

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.

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

#232

Post by comboy »

nate_meurer wrote: post #228
comboy wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1. https://www.scielo.br/j/hb/a/PSXVNhx63TkLq9rFKVFNfjr/?lang=e...

2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/016788...

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

#233

Post by sparker72678 »

Igelau wrote: post #159
tokai wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the actual paper for the actual numbers. Also lead is a problem in any concentration.

> any concentration 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?

This.

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.

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

#234

Post by lumost »

im3w1l wrote: post #59
lumost wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bui…

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.

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

#235

Post by sparker72678 »

mdavis6890 wrote: post #227

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, alum…

Exactly. There's no scale of risk/impact in these conversations, it's always binary.

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

#236

Post by whimsicalism »

nate_meurer wrote: post #187
whimsicalism wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me know the next time I can vote to have my CEO replaced, thanks :)

Check the agenda for your next shareholder meeting. You're welcome :)

Most shareholder elections don't have a yes/no vote on the CEO - and I work for a wholly owned subsidiary, so have no say in that either.

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

#237

Post by jcrben »

lutorm wrote: post #161
Symbiote wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe pilots should be required to lick a block of lead before each flight, so they have some incentive to stop using leaded fuel.

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…

Many of these pilots are basically just rich people flying for fun.

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

#238

Post by nate_meurer »

comboy wrote: post #232
nate_meurer wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

It sounds like you're overthinking this a bit.

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.

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

#240

Post by comboy »

nate_meurer wrote: post #238
comboy wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

It sounds like you're overthinking this a bit. 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 th…

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.

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