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Children poisoned by lead on U.S. Army bases
- dqpb 8y agoWe are our own worst enemies
- prions 8y agoMilitary bases are some of the most polluted sites in America. Lots of soil/groundwater contamination from BTEX and other poorly handled chemicals. However, Military bases provide a lot of research for remediation engineering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Military_Superfund_sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Military_Superfund_si... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167701207002539 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016770120...
- gaahrdner 8y agoYes, sadly this is not an anomaly: https://www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/camp-lejeune/ https://www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/camp-lejeune/
- shrikant 8y agoFuck me! The top comment as of now in this comments page is someone's personal experience of Camp Lejeune! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18197954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18197954
- gaahrdner 8y agoWell, it is a huge base! Hey, at least the VA can cover my out-of-pocket cancer expenses?
- sambull 8y agoFamily used to work on a big air force base (in major metro), they'd just dump chemicals straight into the creek behind the base from the shops.
- village-idiot 8y agoDon’t forget all the lead from rifle ammunition!
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago>The 80-year-old white stucco home... Well there's your problem. Old houses have lead. It should be assumed to be that way unless there's reason to believe otherwise. It'll be another 50+yr before most lead paint is gone. The fact of the matter is that labor is expensive in this country so lead paint is rarely dealt with unless it's conveniently within the scope of other work. I don't think this article very meaningful unless we have more data points. Is base housing more or less likely to contain lead than similiar quality housing in other cities?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- crunchlibrarian 8y agoSure, but when you're talking about a military house inside a military base owned and maintained by the military you have to assume that the military bears some responsibility for it. Just waving your hands and walking away because it's old is a bit short sighted.
- craftyguy 8y agoI'm non sure why you are being downvoted, and in typical HN fashion no one wants to take the time to explain why. I don't think anyone would excuse an apartment building owner for renting apartments to tenants with lead painted walls, so I'm not sure why folks here think the US Army should get a free pass...
- brohoolio 8y agoNo one is getting a free pass. The article discusses private landlords.
- ra1n85 8y agoIt’s as recent as anything built before 1986 when it comes to lead pipes: https://www.epa.gov/lead/protect-your-family-exposures-lead https://www.epa.gov/lead/protect-your-family-exposures-lead
- tachang 8y agoWhere exactly in the link does it say the army discourages lead testing? Reuters says "Yet it also “discourages” this type of lead-paint inspection" at the link https://phc.amedd.army.mil/topics/workplacehealth/ih/Pages/Lead.aspx https://phc.amedd.army.mil/topics/workplacehealth/ih/Pages/L...
- brohoolio 8y agoIt doesn’t force remediation for lead paint, it indicates only deteriorating paint is addressed.
- swayvil 8y agoMaybe lead-damaged people make better soldiers.
- hammock 8y agoStupid question, but how is the danger from lead paint? Do you have to eat paint chips? I see you can breathe in the dust- how much dust does it take?
- somebodythere 8y agoCanada considers blood lead levels of less < 10 µg/dL as "safe", however there were measurable differences in IQ in children with blood lead levels even below this level. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235210/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235210/ It appears to me that no level of lead exposure is truly safe.
- Gibbon1 8y agoI don't know how much dust it takes, one can google 'lead oxide MSDS' though. Occupational limits are 0.05mg/m3. What I've read is lead is really bad for neurological development. Isn't as bad for adult men. Acute toxicity isn't that bad. LD50 > 10000 mg/kg ( Rat ). Two problems with lead paint is, lead is an insidious poison. The body doesn't clear lead that well and it has a long half life. So small repeated exposures cause harm. And small children will happily eat lead paint chips. Which is an issue since lead is a neurotoxin and impairs brain development at very low levels.
- ItsMe000001 8y ago> Occupational limits are 0.05mg/m3. A note on those limits: The medical limit is zero, and that is not fear mongering but the result of ever more results over decades of research. In a little course I took from Tuft University about drinking water one of the four weeks was dedicated to the topic "lead". Two professors, one an engineer and one a medical professor taught the course. The medical professor made that point over several lectures. Also, from personal experience of having been diagnosed with chronic heavy metal poisoning by lab data (university clinic, researcher specialist doctor) as well as by unexpectedly amazing success of chelation treatment using DMPS and DMSA, and continuing far beyond when excretion went way below "thresholds" I too can tell you from my own experience that effects are there for extremely small quantities, just as the often population-level and statistics based research shows. My "on/off" experience for years of using chelators let me have extremely uncommon experiences. First of all, this kind of stuff is almost never diagnosed (only pretty high doses of acute poisoning are easy to test for, what is stored in the body is inaccessible to tests unless you cut a piece off of organs to send to the lab - forget blood tests, they only show what's on the move outside cells right now). Second, when people get chelators they stop when only little is excreted. From my experience that is an error, treatment should continue until the patient says there are no effects (of the treatment) any more. What remains stored in the body comes out very very slowly. Chelators only have access to extracelluar space to begin with. Something that happens to (heavy metal) chronic poisoning patients quite often is that excretion levels at first remain pretty low, or they go down quickly - but after a few months of chelation the suddenly go up, and the body starts acting funny (it starts excreting on its own). Happened to me too, after half a year of linear decrease of after-chelation measurements it suddenly went up by a factor of three, and my body became very active, lots and lots of stuff happening. For example - and I felt that because the surrounding tissue was "active" for a few weeks - a nodule I had in an enlarged thyroid as well as the enlargement itself completely disappeared. The endocrinologist who just two years before had recommended surgery was left stumbling "I'm amazed" again and again - after checking the thyroid twice with ultrasound because he could not believe it. This phenomenon shows that the body may not excrete on its own when the burden is too high. So for me the whole discussion is quite personal, but ten years ago I would have been like everybody else, I would not have taken this whole very abstract issue seriously at all. That there is a limit is because it is not technically possible to get to zero when there are heavy metals, or for everybody to avoid it, so the government sets a limit as a compromise between cost and what is achievable. By the way, I had my two Italian espresso portafilter machines tested for lead. The expensive one which had everything made of copper had no lead but elevated copper (which is no big deal, copper is essential and the body has pretty good transport mechanisms, see "ceruloplasmin"). The cheaper one with brass though exceeded the drinking water limit many times! I had tested it because I wanted to sell it. It was a Rancilio Sylvia, by the way. What is also notable that several heavy metals at once may be far more (orders of magnitude) toxic than just one. There was a lethal dose study decades ago that tested lead and mercury individually. When they combined the two lethal dose dropped to a thousandth, meaning it was a thousand times more toxic. Mercury is in our environment, especially large predator fish, and in amalgam fillings for teeth. So if somebody who is exposed to "a little bit" of mercury is also exposed to lead you can forget those official thresholds even more.
- drblast 8y agoFormer Navy officer here. The "privatized" housing was a complete farce. There's a natural monopoly on military base housing and turning that over to a for-profit private company nearly guarantees they're going to cut costs at every opportunity. We lived on base for a number of years but after a while it seemed like a scam to siphon the service members' entire housing allowance. Maintenance was horrible, conditions were horrible, there were waiting lists just to get into the housing, and heavy penalties if you broke your lease early with no opportunity to negotiate out, even if the wait list was a mile long. We ended up renting houses near the base out in town that were much cheaper and not infested with mice and cockroaches. Most people I knew who thought living in base housing was convenient and cheaper came to the same conclusion.
- freedomben 8y agoThis was my experience as well. Not to mention, when you do move out, they are extremely anal with inspections and make you pay for "damage" even if you can prove that it was there before you (pictures, etc). And not to mention the weekly inspections. There was a sergeant that used to come around the neighborhood with a ruler, measuring people's grass to ensure it was within regulated length. A friend of mine got in trouble with the first sergeant for not cutting his lawn often enough.
- dx87 8y agoStuff like this is pretty common in the military. When I was stationed at Camp Lejeune NC, my wife worked as a reporter for a local paper. One of her assignments was interviewing people at a town hall style meeting regarding chemicals in the base water supply. Children of people that lived in base housing had an abnormally high cancer rate, but the military denied that any of the contaminated water was leaking into the drinking water. I also remember the barracks I lived in had old asbestos floor tiles and the walls were covered in lead paint. They eventually renovated the barracks, and instead of getting rid of the lead paint, they just painted over it. The asbestos tiles weren't dealt with, and all they said was "just don't use a floor buffer and you'll be fine". There was also a cleaning station where we'd clean our rifles, no safety warnings or instructions were given, and we thought it was just a cleaning solution. Later we saw a warning sticker on it that said to use full eyes, face, and hand protection because the cleaning solution could cause neurological damage. Just waiting for health probelms to crop up once I'm older :/
- jfim 8y ago> instead of getting rid of the lead paint, they just painted over it This is actually one of the correct ways to deal with lead paint, assuming the "paint" is actually a proper encapsulant. See for example https://www.health.ny.gov/environmental/lead/renovation_repair_painting/encapsulants.htm https://www.health.ny.gov/environmental/lead/renovation_repa...
- userbinator 8y agoDitto for the asbestos --- if it's not in a state where fibers of it can easily flake off and float around to be inhaled (technical term is "friable"), it won't do any harm.
- azernik 8y agoAnd, in fact, any work to remove it can kick up dust and increase health hazards.
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- clumsysmurf 8y agoProPublica has a whole series about military bases and pollution, open burns, etc: https://www.propublica.org/article/military-pollution-open-burns-radford-virginia https://www.propublica.org/article/military-pollution-open-b...
- gwbas1c 8y agoI keep seeing reclaimed wood with pretty peeling white paint in high end places. Every time, I wonder if it's lead paint placed by a niave interior decorator.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoMost reclaimed wood doesn't have any character so much of it is enhanced with faux aging treatments so they can charge more and have better uniformity.
- hudibras 8y agoI see a few outdated comments here about the water at Camp Lejeune. In 2012, a law (Camp Lejeune Families Act) was passed to pay for medical care for servicemembers and their families who were affected by the water quality. Additionally, veterans who were stationed at Lejeune during that time now receive "presumptive service connection" for many ailments. This means they automatically receive disability pensions and medical care if they develop one of the ailments; they don't have to prove that they developed it as a result of the water exposure. [0]https://www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/camp-lejeune/index.asp https://www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/camp-lejeune/index...
- Duladian 8y agoFormer Army Vet here. I've lived in buildings that were condemned a year before I was living in them. I was then moved out of it because they were reclassified as condemned. Less than a year later I was moved back into it because we ran short of living space. All of this while there were huge patches of black mold on walls, in vents, and on the bed mattress themselves. The guidance we received was to bleach everything. I'm not sure if this was done because of ignorance or more nefarious reasons. We ultimately took note of the worse rooms and avoided using them when possible. It almost always takes the local news agency breaking a story about these condemned barracks before anything is actually done. Usually they just condemn the building again and the cycle repeats. This was located in GA where humidity is a problem and almost entirely impossible to combat. If I was hard pressed, I do have pictures of rooms I've lived in with patches of mold on the walls.