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

ourworldindata.org

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

#171

Post by twofornone »

dfadsadsf wrote: post #86
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…

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.

>So far there has not been identified single parameter that explains White/Black gap and not for the lack of trying.

Actually there has been, we're just not allowed to apply the components of the explanation to this context, so we continue on a fruitless search in every other direction, spending money, contorting society, and increasingly tearing down achievers in a misguided attempt to bring up the underperformers.

We know of hundreds of genes which are strongly correlated with IQ and directly influence behavior, and we know how those genes are distributed among various demographics. The science itself is not controversial or uncertain. But the logical conclusions are social and career suicide.

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

#172

Post by carapace »

selimthegrim wrote: post #129
carapace wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There used to be a whole stereotype around "lazy Southerners" that turned out to be a massive hookworm infestation! > ...victims succumbed to an insatiable exhaustion and an impenetrable haziness of the mind that some called stupidity. Adults neglected their fields and children grew pale and listless. Victims developed grossly distended bellies and “angel wings”—emaciated shoulder blades accentuated by hunching. All…

Also changes in the way corn was processed after the Civil War exacerbated pellagra.

Ah... I hadn't heard about that:

> Pellagra was first reported in 1902 in the United States, and has "caused more deaths than any other nutrition-related disease in American history", reaching epidemic proportions in the American South during the early 1900s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellagra#United_States

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

#173

Post by nate_meurer »

Tyr42 wrote: post #170
hammock wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So, lead paint actually tastes sweet, which can explain why kids who don't know better will eat it.

Why do you think lead paint tastes sweet?

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

#174

Post by planetsprite »

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…

People underestimate just how much minor public health measures can dramatically improve livelihood and overall prosperity.

Before the advent of iodized salt, the prevalence of goiter in certain cities in Michigan was as high as 60%. This also led to various mental deficiencies in people in those regions. It turns out this was a direct consequence of the soil in the Midwest being naturally deficient in iodine, leading to drinking water not naturally supplementing the diet of those who lived there. Iodized salt, introduced in the 1920s, almost completely eradicated goiter in the developing world.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3509517/#:~:tex....

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

#175

Post by zozbot234 »

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 proper way of phrasing this argument is that the systemic oppression was mediated by lead exposure. Meaning that if you intervene to mitigate the latter, you've managed to deal with a significant chunk of the former.

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

#176

Post by nate_meurer »

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?

Latex paint steadily degrades until it's dust. The breakdown is accelerated by UV light, but the end product of all exposed latex painted surfaces is the same; it chalks, flakes, and steadily emits dust and fine particles into the environment.

Regular re-painting can keep the old paint largely encapsulated, but it's still there waiting for an unsuspecting home owner to sand or scrape it loose while doing repairs or renovation.

Outdoors, that dust contributes to the lead load in the soil around the house. Indoors, it's house dust, which babies and kids are naturally bathed in because they live closer to the floor than adults do, and because they put everything in their mouths. In both cases the vectors of exposure are both oral and by inhalation.

Another big contributor to lead dust in households is older (early 2000's and earlier) vinyl window blinds [1]. Many vinyl products contained lead, and vinyl chalks the same way latex paint does as it degrades.

1 - https://cchealth.org/lead-poison/pdf/miniblinds.pdf

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

#177

Post by nate_meurer »

drra wrote: post #145
jakub_g wrote: post #3

I knew about lead poisoning for a while, but mostly in US context. It's almost a non-topic in Europe since leaded gasoline was banned (I'm actually wondering why: no leaded paints in EU?) If these numbers are true, why this is not on first pages of all media all the time? Crazy. I wonder how reliable are these numbers.

I did a lot of metal detecting in Central Europe and amount of lead found on farmlands was shocking. Some places I could gather over a kilo from a single are. Not sure how much this kind of debris contributes to lead poisoning but I don't think it's easily cleanable.

What form did you find it in? Are we talking chunks of metal?

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

#178

Post by zozbot234 »

xyzzyz wrote: post #154
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fract…

> differences in lead exposure explain very little fraction of the outcome gap here

Note that tiny fractional differences in the median outcome gap will turn into big differences at the left- and right-wards tails of the distribution. In practice, those are the differences that everyone will ask about. Why are so many X's (relative to Y's) living in socially marginalized settings, resorting to crime, ending up in the justice system? Why are there so very few X's in very high-skill, high-effort occupations like computer programming and other hard-STEM fields? The X's and Y's will vary by time and place, of course. And societal oppression of various sorts is always playing a role in these dynamics, if only as an amplifying feedback. But either way, these are questions about uncommon, tail outcomes not average or median ones!

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

#179

Post by nate_meurer »

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…

Important in what way?

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

#180

Post by throwawayciv651 »

dfadsadsf wrote: post #86
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…

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.

Along with replies by ’ClumsyPilot and ’ruined, remember that Brown v. Board of Education was passed only in 1954 and 1954 is just yesterday.

Also see this HN comment from a day ago on how much a black person had to fear even in 1980:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30061511

An excelelnt book regarding these is 'Simple Justice by Richard Kluger

https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Justice-Education-Americas-Str...

Another book focusing on computing is 'Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing by Jane Margolis

https://www.amazon.com/Stuck-Shallow-End-Education-Computing...

There is a wealth of info regarding these things, see redlining for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

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