3 ms·

Except the case of Flint, where in the article I linked to, the people who set the threshold of 5 have had to backtrack, and reassure parents that their childre

by ern 10y ago

Except the case of Flint, where in the article I linked to, the people who set the threshold of 5 have had to backtrack, and reassure parents that their children are not really "poisoned". The article also mentions concern over the stigma those kids will carry going forward of being labelled as "brain damaged". Such labelling isn't cost-free, and can wreak serious emotional damage on parents and children. But Edwards says that labeling children as “brain damaged” is also unjust. “Poisoning is obviously a loaded word,” he adds. “I’ve spoken to many parents in Flint, and I’m concerned because I don’t want children there defined by what happened to them https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/flint-s-lead-tainted-water-may-not-cause-permanent-brain-damage/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/flint-s-lead-tain... You will notice all the caveats in the article above, that are generally ignored in mainstream reporting of scientific studies around lead. If you can recommend a better strategy, I'd like to hear it. How about scientific studies that actually attempt to quantify the effects of lead, to determine an actual threshold of harm, handle confounding properly, and avoiding emotive and alarmist tropes when publicizing the results of those studies? Alarmism may be useful in the short term for getting action taken (and getting funding), but in the long-term, it will cause people to "tune out" or worse, to adopt anti-science attitudes (see current Global Warming skepticism).

AbrahamParangi 10y ago
Your points about being careful about labeling are fair. I guess what I'm saying is this: Imagine that you have to set rules. The health and well-being of many people depend on you doing a good job setting those rules. You want to determine the most optimal rules but you have limited time and budget. You need to pick a number. You are lower-bounded by what is feasible and you don't know where your upper bound is. In this scenario, I think it is reasonable to pick a number which is near the lower bound and probably below the upper bound (aka what they did) rather than figuring out what the upper bound is. -Because honestly it may not be possible to reliably determine the upper bound (without literally poisoning people). Data is often scarce or bad when it comes to things which cannot (legally, ethically) be tested. Moreover consider the failure modes: If you pick an upper bound which is too low but still trivially attainable for most people (97.5%) then you inconvenience a very small minority of communities. If you pick an upper bound which is too high, you are literally personally responsible for causing brain damage in children. It's the sort of situation that the term 'better safe than sorry' was intended for.
- ern 10y ago
  In a world of unlimited resources, you'd obviously keep moving the threshold down, but according to OP, many jurisdictions were slow to react to the last change, and many labs can't deal accurately with very low exposure levels anyway (meaning more limited resources being expended to upgrade these labs). Also, it seems like there are methodological improvements that can be made to observational studies to get closer to an answer for a threshold without literally poisoning people: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27009351 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27009351

by ern 10y ago

AbrahamParangi 10y ago

Your points about being careful about labeling are fair. I guess what I'm saying is this: Imagine that you have to set rules. The health and well-being of many people depend on you doing a good job setting those rules. You want to determine the most optimal rules but you have limited time and budget. You need to pick a number. You are lower-bounded by what is feasible and you don't know where your upper bound is. In this scenario, I think it is reasonable to pick a number which is near the lower bound and probably below the upper bound (aka what they did) rather than figuring out what the upper bound is. -Because honestly it may not be possible to reliably determine the upper bound (without literally poisoning people). Data is often scarce or bad when it comes to things which cannot (legally, ethically) be tested. Moreover consider the failure modes: If you pick an upper bound which is too low but still trivially attainable for most people (97.5%) then you inconvenience a very small minority of communities. If you pick an upper bound which is too high, you are literally personally responsible for causing brain damage in children. It's the sort of situation that the term 'better safe than sorry' was intended for.

ern 10y ago
In a world of unlimited resources, you'd obviously keep moving the threshold down, but according to OP, many jurisdictions were slow to react to the last change, and many labs can't deal accurately with very low exposure levels anyway (meaning more limited resources being expended to upgrade these labs). Also, it seems like there are methodological improvements that can be made to observational studies to get closer to an answer for a threshold without literally poisoning people: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27009351 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27009351