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

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

medicalxpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 479 posts

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

#81

Post by doug_durham »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #78
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.

What are we going to do? Pass a law? To force the millions of voters paying hardly any property tax who bought their lead-loaded homes in 1983 for $40,000 in Los Angeles and San Francisco, now worth $1.1m, to you know, fix them? Then will we pay for the even greater rise in rents? I hate lead, pollution and my incredibly cheap landlord, but I feel like I have no choice in California.

You obviously didn't live in the SF Bay area in the 80's. Houses were not that cheap even then.

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

#82

Post by hutzlibu »

amelius wrote: post #41
tgv wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is allowed because we don’t drink from the hot water tap.

I know people who fill their water boiler with hot tap water ...

Me too and it always felt wrong to me and never did it myself. Now I have a solid reason.

Oh and you should not drink directly from the warm tab water, as warm water that was standing some time, has way more microorganisms .. a point my 2 year old is not yet accepting.

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

#83

Post by shawnz »

narrator wrote: post #66

DMSA, which is the treatment for lead poisoning, is cheap, can be taken orally and has a good safety profile. Shame that doctors are not more familiar with it.

Doctors certainly are familiar with chelation therapy (like DMSA) as a treatment for heavy metal poisoning (like from lead)

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

#84

Post by gpt5 »

csa wrote: post #48
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?

> "it just measures your ability to take tests" This is largely wrong. One could be a master at test-taking and not come close to a high score. That said, familiarly with the test/item structure almost certainly helps, especially for folks with the potential to score high (see below). > or "it just tells you how rich your parents are") Hmm… family wealth and IQ may be correlated, but not perfectly so. There are plent…

Dude, you are spewing out random things as if they are fact. Yet you lack an understanding of what IQ is.

IQ is an attempt to measure a general intelligence factor (g-factor). What happened is that researchers noticed that people who are good at some tests tend to also be good at other tests, even if it's from very different domain. E.g. say you are good with math, you also tend to be good in you language skills. This led to the assumption that there is a general factor out there that is shared across all skills (the g-factor). So determining how good you are at math is a combination of your math specific skills + the g-factor. Same with other domains.

How do you extract the g-factor? You measure a large set of people across a cognitive challenging set of tests, and do a factor analysis (statistical technique) to extract a linear g-factor. Each test can have a "g-loading" which essentially calculates what portion of it is due to the general g-factor. For example, one of the tests with the highest g-load is simply hearing a sequence of numbers and repeating them in reverse. This test has nothing to do with "reasoning skills. Yet for some reason you claim that it's designed to measure reasoning skills but not designed to measure "a bunch of other things".

You also claim that IQ varies significantly day to day, but that has not been shown in studies. In fact, IQ measurements tend to be remarkably stable across the person's entire adult life.

Than you spewed up a bunch of unsubstantiated claims about the difference of IQ between a leader and his team.

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

#85

Post by rkagerer »

mschuster91 wrote: post #76
djmips wrote: post #26

Does anyone know the the risk is for electronics hobbyist?

Unless you're dealing with electronics made prior to 2006, almost all of what you'll be soldering with is lead-free. Thank the EU's RoHS directive for that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Subst...

There's a lot of argument that lead-free solder isn't as good (or easy to use) and several hobbyists still use leaded solder.

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

#86

Post by highwaylights »

jopsen wrote: post #63

While a lot of this appears to be estimates... it's pretty wild of 30% of deaths from cardiovascular are caused by lead. Mostly in low/middle income countries. > It's items in the kitchen that are poisoning them On a positive note: This is something that can be fixed.

I'd be interested to know how someone can be sure that the cookware/tableware/cutlery in their home is safe.

Is this a result of far lower standards in other places or just a result of that being the region that was tested for the report (the post doesn't say, it just mentions that samples were collected from developing countries).

This could very easily be a massive problem in the developed world too and you wouldn't know from the report here.

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

#87

Post by swayvil »

uoaei wrote: post #64
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some races with average scores of 70. Can you believe it? Why of course I am talking about "white america" in 1900s [1]. [1] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/03/smarter > Over the past 100 years, Americans' mean IQ has been on a slow but steady climb. Between 1900 and 2012, it rose nearly 30 points, which means that the average person of 2012 had a higher IQ than 95 percent of the population had in 1900.

Goodhart's law strikes again. As soon as IQ becomes a measurable thing, populations that measure it will act in ways that increase it. Shocking, I know.

It's interesting how closely tied "goodness" and "intelligence" are.

To make a mistake is to be a bad person. To be stupid is to be bad.

I can call you weak. I can even call you ugly, cowardly or a flibbertigibbet. But if I call you stupid look out!

Like our whole worth as humans is summed in our ability to talk smart and solve riddles like a trained animal.

Which seems pretty stupid.

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

#88

Post by coding123 »

jopsen wrote: post #63

While a lot of this appears to be estimates... it's pretty wild of 30% of deaths from cardiovascular are caused by lead. Mostly in low/middle income countries. > It's items in the kitchen that are poisoning them On a positive note: This is something that can be fixed.

How can it be fixed?

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

#89

Post by bmacho »

insanitybit wrote: post #72
dboreham wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a terrible way to make tea, fwiw.

I want to stress that I actually don't give a shit (I am not that into tea, I just drink it sometimes, it's not a big deal to me), but I am curious as to why.

Unrelated to the tea, but cold water is somewhat safer to drink than water coming from your boiler, that's why.

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

#90

Post by lkbm »

jopsen wrote: post #63

While a lot of this appears to be estimates... it's pretty wild of 30% of deaths from cardiovascular are caused by lead. Mostly in low/middle income countries. > It's items in the kitchen that are poisoning them On a positive note: This is something that can be fixed.

I'm reminded of an old SSC post[0]:

> See, my terrible lecture on ADHD suggested several reasons for the increasing prevalence of the disease. Of these I remember two: the spiritual desert of modern adolescence, and insufficient iron in the diet. And I remember thinking "Man, I hope it’s the iron one, because that seems a lot easier to fix."

The discovery that we can dramatically reduce mortality by the relatively straightforward solution of using pots and pans that don't contain lead is a cause for excitement. Compare that to the solutions like "convince people to exercise more and eat less (or less tasty) food". We know how to make our dishes lead-free!

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biolo...

Post reply on HN