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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

#151

Post by thriftwy »

londons_explore wrote: post #111
thriftwy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be very illegal to bring such raw materials on the market.

Lead is so important in making ceramics, there is nobody proposing to ban it. Instead, the main proposal is to require ceramics to be tested after manufacture to ensure that the dose of lead leached into any given food or drink is sufficiently low. The main way that is achieved is by firing the ceramics at higher temperatures and longer to ensure the lead is better chemically bound to the rest of the pottery and leac…

That sounds like very bad news to me. So now I have to trust whoever made the ceramics to not sacrifice this step, which I can't really check on my own.

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

#152

Post by newbamboo »

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.

Or focus all resources on the wrong problem and ensure everyone is trying to optimize the wrong thing, thereby actually exacerbating the very problems that we as a society need to address. Sometimes the wrong solution is much worse than doing nothing.

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

#153

Post by fer »

Thetawaves wrote: post #127
fer wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most flying is done in airliners (at least in passenger-miles), whose engines don't benefit from any lead. On the other hand, smaller, piston-engine aircrafts are overwhelmingly a hobby for relatively wealthy people, where leaded avgas is commonplace. This is just anecdotal, but in the aerodrome near where I live, I'd be surprised if less than 90% of the flights are leisure flights.

This is just not true. The vast majority of hours flown (and fuel burned) are for commercial purposes. These are real money-making enterprises, not some rich persons play thing.

I think you've misread me.

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

#154

Post by xyzzyz »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #120
gruez wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Living in lead-rich environments is an example of systemic oppression, iiuc. There is a lot of nuance lost in any generality but in this case I do not believe it is a misattribution as much as it is an incomplete descriptor

The problem with using lead-rich environment as an example of systemic oppression, and the reason why activists are taking very little about lead these days, is that unlike “systemic oppression”, lead exposure is something very concrete, and it can be tested and studied. We did a lot of studies, in fact, on this particular issue, and the results are pretty clear: differences in lead exposure explain very little fraction of the outcome gap here. It turns out that in many places, exposure to lead is either overall minimal, or there is no big difference in exposure to it across races, but the gap is just as big as everywhere else. This is inconvenient for the lead blaming narrative, and so the narrative is abandoned in favor of more magical, less well specified theories, that cannot be studied as easily.

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

#155

Post by lkbm »

refurb wrote: post #80
thinkcontext wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm actually wondering why: no leaded paints in EU? The dangers of lead paint have been known for over 100 years. France banned it in 1909. The League of Nations adopted a treaty on it in 1922. The US declined to join the treaty due to industry lobbying and didn't get around to banning it until 1978. By declining to ban it the US cost itself $Ts when accounting for the developmental delays, lost IQ points, health p…

You have a source because your statement seems quite wrong. Google tells me lead paint wasn’t banned in the UK until the 1990’s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-based_paint_in_the_Unit... France was 1948, but lots of lead poisoned children anyways since the paint is still on buildings people live in. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13918871-200-lead-pai...

Looking a little more into France's question:

I found this article:

"White lead pigment in paint had been recognized as toxic and restricted since 1915; it had been banned from professional use since 1926 and from craft work since 1948."[0]

Wikipedia's citation[1] does appear to be a delcaration from 1909 stating: "ART. 2. - A l'expiration de la cinquième année qui suivra la promulgation de la présente loi, l'emploi de la céruse, de l'huile de lin plombifère et de tout produit spécialisé renfermant de la céruse, sera interdit dans tous les travaux de peinture de quelque nature qu'ils soient, exécutés par les ouvriers peintres, tant à l'extérieur qu'à l'intérieur des bâtiments_"

Translated using https://www.deepl.com/translator : "ART. 2 - At the end of the fifth year following the promulgation of the present law, the use of ceruse, leaded linseed oil and any specialized product containing ceruse, will be prohibited in all painting work of any nature whatsoever, carried out by painters, both outside and inside buildings." ("ceruse" is white lead.)

This supports the 1915 (the fifth year following 1909) in the first article.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448552/

[1] https://solidarites-sante.gouv.fr/fichiers/numerisations3/bu... (p202 of the PDF, p172 by the original document page numbers)

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

#156

Post by sjf »

thinkcontext wrote: post #84
refurb wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a source because your statement seems quite wrong. Google tells me lead paint wasn’t banned in the UK until the 1990’s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-based_paint_in_the_Unit... France was 1948, but lots of lead poisoned children anyways since the paint is still on buildings people live in. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13918871-200-lead-pai...

"To protect the health of painters, France had passed in 1909 a law banning the use of paints containing lead for the painting of the interior and exterior of all buildings." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_paint "The League of Nations banned white-lead interior paint in 1922 (you know an environmental regulation is old if it was issued by the League of Nations), but the U.S. declined to implement the ban." https:…

But the UK was in the league of nations...

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

#157

Post by speed_spread »

narrator wrote: post #103
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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 a…

Asbestos brake pads release particles as they wear down. Asbestos in construction is just pushing problems down to the next generations who will have to deal with the stuff when renovating.

Same for PCBs, they don't degrade naturally and will persist long after the components they're in have reached EOL. They'll get taken care by the lowest bidder and disappear for decades until they surface back and become everybody's problem.

Lead is just as toxic but affects the central nervous system instead of lungs or giving you cancer.

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

#158

Post by lkbm »

anonfornoreason wrote: post #42
geden wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our Victorian property still has a (shared) lead supply pipe. I've been repeatedly told it's not an issue due to (presumed) calcification on the inside of the pipe. All the interior pipework is copper. Our water was tested years ago by the waterboard and came back way below the legal limit. Yet still... I'm suspicious. Can anyone point me at resources to help prove it's unsafe?

Look at what happened in flint Michigan. Lead pipes were calcified, but then the water bureau stopped adding an agent to reduce the natural ph of the river water. This caused the calcification to get stripped and for lead to start leaching into the water. All it takes is a change in ph of your water supply to put you at risk.

Good point. Perhaps one cheap way GP could monitor it themselves might be to just monitor pH and do a lead test if that changes.

Just replacing the pipes seems like the optimal solution, but half-measures are better than nothing.

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

#159

Post by matheusmoreira »

adrianN wrote: post #12
wongarsu wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is based on a UNICEF report [1], which from a cursory glance seems to suggest that while the problem is present to some degree everywhere, it's by far the most pronounced in East and South Asia (but caused health care costs in relation to GDP is worst in Africa) "One of the most concerning sources of lead exposure is the unsound recycling of used lead-acid batteries (ULABs), most of which are found in car…

Youtube has many extremly scary videos showing battery recycling operations, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEvPjOKkPyE

Working directly with batteries and lead dust with no protection equipment, with nothing. That's terrifying but at the same time I've become so used to seeing employees do this sort of thing in my own country despite my repeated warnings that I've become numb to it.

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

#160

Post by onlat »

I have a theory that a lot of kids in India have been slow poisoned due to lead in 'traditional pressure cooker safety valves', leading to more pronounced ADHD and hyperactivity symptoms. I am not able to find any studies supporting this. Anecdotal evidences had pointed in the same direction (like this one here https://tamararubin.com/2017/01/butterfly-pressure-cooker-in...)
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