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Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

medicalxpress.com

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Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

#11

Post by cooper_ganglia »

hcrean wrote: post #2

[flagged]

I honestly don’t know enough about the theories to dismiss or validate them offhand, but the article quotes an official as saying that it seems as though the primary issue is that things like ceramic cookware and other household items had more lead in them than initially believed:

> Fuller said part of this "missing piece of the puzzle" was revealed in a Pure Earth report released on Tuesday, which analyzed 5,000 samples of consumer goods and food in 25 developing countries.

>It found high rates of lead contamination in metal pots and pans, ceramic cookware, paint, cosmetics and toys.

>"This is why poorer countries have so much lead poisoning," Fuller said. "It's items in the kitchen that are poisoning them."

Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

#13

Post by colechristensen »

cltby wrote: post #3

Question for any IQ skeptics here (e.g. "it just measures your ability to take tests" or "it just tells you how rich your parents are"): what's your response to studies like this? Is there anything that can be said about the effect of lead on cognitive function? Why might IQ be a good measure of lead-induced stupidification, but unreliable for literally anything else?

IQ is a mediocre-at-best metric for intelligence. "Intelligence" is probably real and variable among people, but poorly defined, very hard to test, and subject to a whole lot of opinion.

IQ is bad at comparing people from different backgrounds, especially across cultures, languages, etc.

But IQ can be a valid comparison for a single non-cultural variable. i.e. lead exposure in otherwise identical cohorts.

Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

#15

Post by rjsw »

jiofj wrote: post #5
cltby wrote: post #3

Question for any IQ skeptics here (e.g. "it just measures your ability to take tests" or "it just tells you how rich your parents are"): what's your response to studies like this? Is there anything that can be said about the effect of lead on cognitive function? Why might IQ be a good measure of lead-induced stupidification, but unreliable for literally anything else?

[flagged]

Or people just haven't tried hard enough to find a politically correct explaination.

I think slavery itself could be one cause of it. Restricting the freedom to pick a partner of one group compared with other nearby groups seems likely to have an effect.

Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

#16

Post by hedora »

cltby wrote: post #3

Question for any IQ skeptics here (e.g. "it just measures your ability to take tests" or "it just tells you how rich your parents are"): what's your response to studies like this? Is there anything that can be said about the effect of lead on cognitive function? Why might IQ be a good measure of lead-induced stupidification, but unreliable for literally anything else?

I assume the study authors controlled for such things. For example, they could bin the study participants by socioeconomic group, race, location, etc, etc, etc, and then show the average IQ loss per bin.

I haven't read the study, but statisticians do this stuff for a living, and there are definitely ways to control for sample biases that let you distinguish between "poorer people have lower IQs and are exposed to more lead, and the root cause of both is being poor", and "lead leads to lower IQs within all socioeconomic groups we could think of and measure"

Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

#17

Post by klyrs »

hedora wrote: post #9
jiofj wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Critical race theory explains IQ differences between socioeconomic groups (including races) extremely well.

Critical Race Theory is politically incorrect, under any definition of political correctness I know

Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

#18

Post by amluto »

hedora wrote: post #6

I'd like to point out that, although it is illegal to put lead in water supply lines in the US, there is a loophole that allows it in hot water lines. As a result, for certain fittings, most big-box hardware stores only sell the leaded variants, and label them "hot water heater supply line" or something similar.

There’s another loophole: “lead free” means that the wetted surface is no more than 0.25% lead (by mass, I think).

As far as I know, lead has nice properties as an element added to brass alloys. Which is not an excuse for using it, IMO.

(Why is any of this still a thing? Stainless steel is cheaper than copper these days, and it’s a great material as long as you aren’t trying to screw one piece of stainless steel into another, and there isn’t a great reason why one should need to do much of that. And there are some excellent plastics available, too.)

Re: Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

#20

Post by colordrops »

digitcatphd wrote: post #14

Studies like these always make me wonder what the equivalent of this today. Microplastics? Carbon? What else?

Pretty much anything our ecosystem hasn't had time to evolve and adapt to is likely going to have some deleterious effect on the life forms within.
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