Sparrows may be 'canary in the coal mine' for lead poisoning in children: study

Instead of testing sparrows to infer blood lead in children why not just test the children?

In the specific case of this study they tested both (and looked back at historic records) and now know that sparrows make a very good proxy for human results.

This is useful because:

    The Macquarie University environmental scientist and PhD candidate said collecting blood samples from people, especially children, can be difficult to conduct, and can raise significant logistical and ethical issues.

    As a result, data on children's blood lead levels is unavailable in many parts of Australia where communities intersect with mining and smelting operations.

~ Linked article, towards the end.

It's also not just Australia where human proxies are useful.

> collecting blood samples from people, especially children, can be difficult to conduct, and can raise significant logistical and ethical issues.

Really? Children visit family doctors relatively often in my experience and taking a blood sample is a trivial and routine task for the nurse at my GP's surgery. What ethical issue is there?

> in my experience

Well, that's all that counts then I guess, never mind the stated opinion of medical researchers in the field with broader experience.

Christian Scientists and Jehovah’s Witnesses oppose blood transfusions and small town groups (which can be quite large in specific towns and non existant in others) can oppose blood samples also.

Various indiginous groups within Australia and elsewhere can be opposed to medical tests .. for fear of being guinea pigs in experiments again. Some people just don't like giving samples.

It’s rarely that sinister on the political level in my experience. Having worked a decade in the Danish public sector with access to the higher echelons of decision making I’ve never really witnessed influence or blatant corruption amongst the elected official. Well, there is influence but it’ll typically be along the lines of getting better road access or being allowed to expand in zones that weren’t really meant for it. Not because of personal gain but because jobs are just so valuable to a political administration.

Where things get more complicated is typically with the unelected administration. Basically you can view most political decision making as an administration working out action plans and presenting them to politicians. Which is a good concept, until people stop participating in things like public hearings. Because the officials who work in the administration are professional and politicians in cities are often… well you or me. This means that it’s sort of easy for officials to influence decision making by writing and presenting the different action plans in ways where they know which are more likely to be selected. This is sometimes influenced by corruption, and usually that gets caught eventually around here. It’s much more often that it’s simply influenced by the different silos protecting themselves. Which will lead to bad decision making.

Now, I mentioned things like public hearings earlier and these are actually immensely influential because most politicians are actually very open to hear from the public. The big issue is that most of the people who attend or respond to public hearings are either fanatics or crackpots. When regular people actually participate in their local democracy they can have a huge influence, much more so than both administration and business, but people don’t. I’m not a saint myself, it’s been more than a decade since I even bothered to read the proposals which are sent to me. To make things even worse, fewer and fewer people register as members of political parties which means they give up their influence on selecting candidates and when it’s time to vote, many simply vote on a party, not on a specific candidate. So we’re gradually giving over power to anyone who actually does participate, which is often going to be business.