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Around one-in-three children globally suffer from lead poisoning

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Re: Around one-in-three children globally suffer from lead poisoning

#101

Post by StingyJelly »

wincy wrote: post #95
dfadsadsf wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's uplifting story and I can easily believe that higher lead exposure for Black kids over white kids led to lower IQ results in tests in that specific case, there are no school districts in US with no gap between white and Black students. So far there has not been identified single parameter that explains White/Black gap and not for the lack of trying.

I mean in an interview Steven Pinker himself said there’s some things that we may not want to know, because if the parameter is wholly outside of human control it’d just contribute to racism and serve no useful purpose. Also even if a study found parameters like that, it would never be published as the scientists career would absolutely be ruined.

Steven Pinker is right in this regard and so was Plato: … The doings of Cronus, and the sufferings which in turn his son inflicted upon him, even if they were true, ought certainly not to be lightly told to young and thoughtless persons … they are stories not to be repeated in our State …

Re: Around one-in-three children globally suffer from lead poisoning

#102

Post by tzs »

hammock wrote: post #94
tzs wrote: post #24

I can't give a cite for the following I read it in either a newspaper or magazine probably 30+ years ago. There was a school district in a small town that for the first time gave IQ tests to all of the children in some younger age group, I think around 7 or 8. The results showed a several point difference between the white kids and the Black kids. The district wrote this off as due to cultural bias in the tests. One…

What is the vector for lead exposure from paint? Do we think they are all eating it, or that their parents/landlords are constantly sanding it for some reason and not simply painting over it? edit: Why am I being downvoted?

"Most lead poisoning in children results from eating chips of deteriorating lead-based paint" [1].

[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/lead-poisonin...

Re: Around one-in-three children globally suffer from lead poisoning

#103

Post by narrator »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #68
narrator wrote: post #53

Perovskite, the new solar panel wonder material will put lead everywhere where there are solar panels in a few years. Carbon nanotubes have asbestos like disease causing properties. Nanotubes are hailed as the new semiconductor material and as having many other wonderful applications. DDTs and PCBs all started out as wonder chemicals. Science marches on.

...and both are fine in laminated materials like solar panels no? No need to scaremonger.

PCBs are fine. It's sealed in transformers. There's an empty lot downtown near me where a substation used to be and they can't build anything on it. A whole city block paved over with a fence around it that will never be used for anything again.

Asbestos is fine, it's stuck in the walls, or it's in break pads nobody is inhaling, etc. However, many large industrial companies slowly went broke over decades because of asbestos lawsuits as cancer linked to asbestos slowly killed 10s of thousands of former employees.

Luckily lead is not as toxic as those two, but these panels are going to break in hailstorms and such and slowly leach. They'll get piled high in landfills in developing countries, etc. Always got to keep all that in mind.

Re: Around one-in-three children globally suffer from lead poisoning

#104

Post by ip26 »

dTal wrote: post #62
tzs wrote: post #24

I can't give a cite for the following I read it in either a newspaper or magazine probably 30+ years ago. There was a school district in a small town that for the first time gave IQ tests to all of the children in some younger age group, I think around 7 or 8. The results showed a several point difference between the white kids and the Black kids. The district wrote this off as due to cultural bias in the tests. One…

This is an excellent cautionary tale against lazily attributing politically inconvenient data to testing bias (which remains fashionable). It may seem like an easy way out, but it also offers an excuse to simply ignore the problem, which perpetuates it.

It isn't necessarily just laziness. The first step to fixing the problem means accepting the results, which in this case meant accepting a certain racial group of (silently lead-poisoned) kids had measurably lower intelligence. I don't think I need to explain why that is a minefield.

Re: Around one-in-three children globally suffer from lead poisoning

#105

Post by sam0x17 »

ip26 wrote: post #104
dTal wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an excellent cautionary tale against lazily attributing politically inconvenient data to testing bias (which remains fashionable). It may seem like an easy way out, but it also offers an excuse to simply ignore the problem, which perpetuates it.

It isn't necessarily just laziness. The first step to fixing the problem means accepting the results, which in this case meant accepting a certain racial group of (silently lead-poisoned) kids had measurably lower intelligence. I don't think I need to explain why that is a minefield.

Right but ironically, the fact that it is a minefield is likely what drove this teacher to make that discovery. Imagine if it was just a random scattering of students living in such apartments (but same number of people). It may have never been discovered in that case.

Re: Around one-in-three children globally suffer from lead poisoning

#106

Post by jabl »

bluedino wrote: post #30
300bps wrote: post #10

I remain shocked how we in the United States knowingly poisoned generations with leaded gasoline. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-... In searching for a substance that made gasoline less flammable (and hence stopped it from igniting outside of a cylinder, i.e. "knocking") we tried everything including adding melted butter! Lead along with a lot of other things worked well but we went with…

Lead also helps with valve seats lasting longer. Automakers switched to hardened valve seats in the 70's when lead was taken out of gas.

AFAIU, expensive (or read: less cost-sensitive) engines designed for operating at close to rated power for extended times, like airplane engines, have used hardened valve seats since the 1920'ies or so.

Re: Around one-in-three children globally suffer from lead poisoning

#108

Post by gruez »

dTal wrote: post #62
tzs wrote: post #24

I can't give a cite for the following I read it in either a newspaper or magazine probably 30+ years ago. There was a school district in a small town that for the first time gave IQ tests to all of the children in some younger age group, I think around 7 or 8. The results showed a several point difference between the white kids and the Black kids. The district wrote this off as due to cultural bias in the tests. One…

This is an excellent cautionary tale against lazily attributing politically inconvenient data to testing bias (which remains fashionable). It may seem like an easy way out, but it also offers an excuse to simply ignore the problem, which perpetuates it.

Now instead of lazily explaining differences with "there must be some testing bias, black kids are just as smart as white kids", we're lazily explaining differences with "it must be systemic oppression, black kids are more oppressed than white kids".

Re: Around one-in-three children globally suffer from lead poisoning

#109

Post by throwaway0a5e »

cathedral2 wrote: post #35

There's a new drug emerging from Berkeley and a company spawned from there called HOPO [1]. The drug is a chelator that has a special affinity for heavy metals in the lanthanide group, which happen to be some of the more toxic metals. This includes gadolinium, which is found in MRI contrast agents, and has been known to cause many-year retention in the bones and skull [2] from just a single dose. "The chelating agent…

> seemingly more addressable market.

Gadolinium will get you blank stares from a lot of people. Lead is well known. Look at the reception this article, which is basically just a summary of the state of affairs ghost written by an activist organization, got. To get people to care about you something that's well written, tugs at heartstrings and confirms biases (imagine a New Yorker article about DuPont dumping something in some rural watershed, that's the kind of media you'd need) to get people to engage just as much. Lead has a MASSIVE mind share among the people who like to fancy themselves as caring about these sorts of things. If they have a drug that can treat lead poisoning they can springboard off of that mind-share in order to sell their drug. They'd be stupid not to.

Edit: typo.

Re: Around one-in-three children globally suffer from lead poisoning

#110

Post by picture »

try_again wrote: post #98
Unklejoe wrote: post #73

Every time I hear "lead poisoning" mentioned, I have flashbacks to myself as a child playing with my Dad's lead fishing weights like an idiot.

My dad had a workshop where he made woodwind instruments. For some applications he required lead. I recall entertaining myself as a kid by melting some small pieces of lead with a welding torch and looking at the pretty liquid metal. It was in the outside air, but I can't help but wonder what I may have done to my brain that day. Thank god he didn't have mercury.

The vapor pressure of lead when it melts isn't anything ridiculous, afaik. It shouldn't have released that much lead gas unless you were really burning it. (See leaded solder) Also, liquid elemental mercury isn't as scary as the organic mercury salts or something that's been concentrated though bio-accumulation. People like Cody's Lab on youtube have tasted liquid mercury for fun
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