Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

futurism.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 276 posts

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

#261

Post by dllthomas »

jmalicki wrote: post #82
dllthomas wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Amazing.

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

#262

Post by WalterBright »

heavyset_go wrote: post #211
WalterBright wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a difference between unions and staffing agencies.

Not fundamentally, though there are legal differences.

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

#263

Post by KorematsuFredt »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #145
KorematsuFredt wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you are talking about society then we already know that free market competition leads to the best outcomes. Who's “we”? I was under the impression that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure was accurate.

Market failure is applicable only in limited cases to the extent that it matters. Employment in this case is not one of those.

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

#264

Post by goatlover »

fighterpilot wrote: post #212
goatlover wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scientifically speaking, there is no "race-specific biology". Race is a social construct. But there are ethnicities which get grouped into racial categories.

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)."

https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-res...

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.

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

#265

Post by effingwewt »

reducesuffering wrote: post #184
nate_meurer wrote: post #154

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 min…

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.

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

#266

Post by raxxorrax »

giantg2 wrote: post #252
sayhar wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 _c…

Don't forget to warn them about the uranium plates

I would prefer uranium plates to lead plates. Long term I would use the good stuff like plastics though.

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

#267

Post by raxxorrax »

jonny_eh wrote: post #138
jimbob45 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This makes the assumption that poorness and crime are correlated, which I recently learned is not a universal truth. Two variables can be correlated, without being 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.

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

#268

Post by relaxing »

nvarsj wrote: post #244
jeffbee wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing about RoHS is preventing you from poisoning yourself and your family in the privacy of your home. Leaded solder is still widely available. https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/kester-solder/24-... Here's half a kilo of lead in a solid metal bar, if you want to just poison a whole city or small country: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/kester-solder/44-...

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.

The risk is in lead transferring from your skin to your mouth, like if you don’t wash your hands before eating.

Still I agree, the risk is acceptable for the small amount of solder work I do.

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

#269

Post by ljf »

agumonkey wrote: post #148
ljf wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

did he find a way to de-pollute ?

No he just grew flowers from then on and I moved to pots and grow bags

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

#270

Post by fighterpilot »

goatlover wrote: post #264
fighterpilot wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Post reply on HN