8 ms·

Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in early childhood

140 points by nabla9 5y ago

graeme 5y ago
Does anyone know if lead levels matter much in adulthood? Found out my local water had lead, old municipal pipes. Drank it about ten years. Or possibly just two. Either way, wondering if I should be concerned or do anything beyond filtering the water (which I do now)
- joecool1029 5y ago
  Provided the municipality treats their water correctly the lead should not dissolve into the water. Did you actually have the lead levels tested in the water? If you're concerned get a blood test for lead levels. No level is good for you but adult exposure is magnitudes less damaging than early childhood (while brain is still developing).
- ohazi 5y ago
  Where?
  - graeme 5y ago
    Montreal. Lots of old pipes. They sent city workers to check, determined my unit’s levels were high and gave me a filter. Planning work in a few years.
- sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
  lead exposure makes people dumb af and mentally ill
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Crude, poor delivery but you may be on to something. I am curious if this is why you see generational differences in mental models and belief systems (there is data showing an inverse relationship between religiosity and intelligence [1] [2]), and why younger, healthier cohorts operate with different mental models. Riffing, if younger cohorts are healthier, you’d expect their average/aggregate cognitive ability to be higher, leading to social stratification. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23921675/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23921675/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence
    - alisonkisk 5y ago
    - erikpukinskis 5y ago
      I’m sure lead levels have some effect, but how do you control for “they grew up in a completely different world”? I’d assume the latter is the primary cause of any major behavior differences, absent some pretty breathtaking science showing otherwise. “Intelligence” is also a pretty goofy measure. If we’re talking about IQ, it’s basically “what quiz questions predict success measures, as defined by the social norms of whoever made the test”. IMO that’s a pretty sketchy way to define intelligence. Certainly not the way I think about it colloquially. To me, success and intelligence are loosely correlated but very different traits.
- kodah 5y ago
  People have a lot of misconceptions about water infrastructure. Approximately 6-10M lead service lines still exist in today's world. (https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/lead-service-line-replacement https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/lead-ser...) Most of that is kept away from you by treating water with a chemical that causes a rust layer to form over the lead, preventing it from getting into the water at dangerous levels. Phosphates are typically used for this purpose. (https://alliancewater.com/why-the-us-still-has-lead-service-lines-and-pipes/ https://alliancewater.com/why-the-us-still-has-lead-service-...) Cities do screw this up, as evidenced in Flint and other areas. Not all filters are designed to remove heavy metals or lead, so you need to be picking a filter based on that. (https://www.consumerreports.org/water-filters/make-sure-your-water-filter-removes-lead-a5825432948/ https://www.consumerreports.org/water-filters/make-sure-your...) There's also other stuff in the water, so picking the right filter for your area is important. Whether you're an adult or a child lead poisoning is equally dangerous (https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/lead-poisoning/symptoms-causes/syc-20354717 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/lead-poisonin...). It is something that can be tested for though.
  - 01100011 5y ago
    I wonder what happens after, say, an earthquake? Can pipes bend enough to cause cracks in the passivated layer and temporarily increase lead levels?
    - kodah 5y ago
      Yeah, they probably could, but the phosphates are always in the water so it'll reform and the amount of lead that gets into the water when disbursed is pretty low ppm (parts per million). The fundamental problem is that this infrastructure is costly to dig up and replace, and the key word here is "service lines". Those are the lines consumers are responsible for paying for. Cities that have lead lines should be working with the EPA to set milestones and goals for yearly replacements with federal funding though.
  - graeme 5y ago
    To clarify: the measured levels from my tap were high, though not crazy high. High enough the city gave a filter to local residents and said not to drink the water from the tap. 7 micrograms per litre, legal limit 5. This was after running the water for a few min.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Generally speaking, it’s not something to freak out about. Usually lead is found in the service lines from the main to your house. Unless the people who run your water utility are criminally negligent (ie. Flint, MI), you’re fine. Run the water for a few seconds before you drink it in the morning to flush out sediment, and if you’re worried, use a filter. Your water utility is required to test and publish results - look at those as well to understand if there is anything to worry about.
- xattt 5y ago
  I recently petitioned my local councillor to have my service line replaced at cost to the city. My only expense was to hire a plumber to do the connection to the house (several hundred bucks); digging was covered by them.
verelo 5y ago
I recall as a kid, soldering circuit boards. I distinctly remember the label "low lead" and also the smell of the smoke it made. At times, and this is stupid, i would find myself chewing on a piece of the unburnt solder as i debugged a circuit board. Mistakes were made...
- emteycz 5y ago
  When I was a kid, I explicitly didn't use non-leaded solder because I liked the smell of the leaded one. Mistakes indeed
  - bushbaba 5y ago
    I too used leaded solder. But only because it was easier to use than the lead free versions
  - Teknoman117 5y ago
    I mostly used lead-free solder as a kid (1990's and 2000's) but I still recall the acrid smell of flux fumes. I've accidentally had a few good whiffs that left me recoiling and coughing a bit. I wonder if that'll have any long term effects...
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    The fumes from non-leaded solder are worse for you (make sure to have good ventilation). The lead doesn’t go into the air; the fumes are from flux. As long as you don’t eat the solder, and wash your hands after soldering, there’s no problem with hobby soldering using lead solder. The reason to prefer lead-free solder is primarily because at industrial scale with tons of trashed electronics the lead becomes an environmental pollutant. For hobbyists, lead solder is easier to work with, and not a serious risk.
    - klyrs 5y ago
      Pretty safe bet that kids playing with lead solder didn't wash their hands afterwards.
- 5y ago
_yo2u 5y ago
Curious if theres any data on how US compares to other countries
- bcrosby95 5y ago
  This would be interesting to see - considering most European countries banned lead paint long before the US, I would expect exposure rates to be lower.
  - pkaye 5y ago
    For leaded fuel, the European countries banned a few years after US so there was still some exposure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Phaseout_and_ban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Phaseout_and_ba...
csee 5y ago
Practically, what should one do to avoid lead poisoning here and now? Lead petrol is banned. Lead paint is banned. Lead pipes are a problem in some areas, but let's assume we don't live in these areas. What do we need to look out for?
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  another one: get your soil tested, don’t wear your shoes in your house
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    > don’t wear your shoes in your house This is good advice for many other contaminants as well.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Paint chips are the main thing. Don’t needlessly demolish anything and if you do, do it right, with containment and wet cleanup. And, ideally, a trained and licensed crew. Don’t let your neighbors DIY exterior painting, scraping, or demolition, or do it with a fly-by-night unlicensed contractor and no permits. Don’t let your kids chew on the window sills. Don’t garden for food without thinking about it first.
  - mindslight 5y ago
    > Don’t let your neighbors DIY exterior painting, scraping, or demolition WTF? Yes, go ahead and advocate responsible techniques. But if you're the type of meddling busybody that harasses others just for working on their own homes, don't be surprised when nobody listens to you.
    - csee 5y ago
      Negative externalities between neighbors is a thing. See noise pollution.
      - 5y ago
Teknoman117 5y ago
A bit of clarification that was something that didn't occur to me immediately from the title: The article is that half of the living US population was exposed to adverse lead levels as a child, not that half of US children today are exposed to adverse lead levels.
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  Makes sense. We had it lying around when I was a kid (in the 1960's). We used to make impressions in clay with ordinary objects then fire up the shop gas torch, melt lead chunks in a forge pot, and pour it into our clay molds! It cooled in seconds, you could break the clay and have a lead toy. Fun!
  - spdegabrielle 5y ago
    I can’t find the reference but I’m pretty sure the majority of childhood lead exposure was via leaded fuel in cars.
  - narag 5y ago
    In the 70s I made a pair of barbells melting 15 kg of the pipes that were replaced. Definitely fun!
holidayacct 5y ago
I'm from a family that has been in real estate since the 80s. Lead remediation was a mandatory requirement in the late 70s. There is almost no lead anywhere in the country except for cities where there were old industrial manufacturing plants or places where there was illegal dumping of materials. You literally can't sell a home or purchase a home with lead issues because no one will purchase the property. There are exceptions where people are gaming the system by controlling the property and town inspection departments but largely lead paint poisoning is an old problem that was solved a long time ago. The only reason children would have a drastic decreae in IQ is going to be a combination of Television and internet usage at extremely young ages which has deleterious affects on will-power, attentional focus, judgement, memory and visuo-spatial analysis. The lead argument really needs to go away it keeps popping up and it is literally impossible in most of the country.
- monocasa 5y ago
  I can tell you that lots of houses weren't remediated like you'd expect. An extra layer of paint, and now 50 years on since the 70s both are chipping sort of thing.
  - mikeyouse 5y ago
    Yeah OP is completely wrong. There is tons of lead paint on the walls in just about every city in the US. Remediation has been completely ad hoc and the restrictions on selling a house with lead paint are almost always a single sheet o paper that says “Sign here to acknowledge that there may be lead paint.”
- wpietri 5y ago
  It amazes me how long "the new thing has ruined the children" has been a trope. You manage to combine two generations of it. Television started ruining children when the Boomers were growing up. The Millennials were ruined by the early internet. And now I hear the Zoomers are being ruined by TikTok. (Presumably Gen X was ruined by cable TV, which you left out.) But that's just recently. The earliest iteration of this moral panic that I know of involved novels: https://www.economist.com/1843/2020/01/20/an-18th-century-moral-panic-sounds-surprisingly-familiar https://www.economist.com/1843/2020/01/20/an-18th-century-mo... That's right, the kids have been ruined since before America existed! Truly, it's amazing this steady worsening of the youth has not destroyed life as we know it.
paulpauper 5y ago
Whether it's increased crime or lowered IQ, lead is likely not as potent as the media hype would suggest. According to a meta study of lead vs. crime the results are inconclusive. Very high exposure to lead my cause a couple point reduction of childhood IQ, which may be temporary and not everyone exposed to lead has a reduced IQ. Regarding lead & IQ and lead & crime ,some links to studies (and the meta study): https://greyenlightenment.com/2021/08/02/the-effects-of-lead-exposure-on-crime-and-iq-likely-overstated/ https://greyenlightenment.com/2021/08/02/the-effects-of-lead... Also, the median childhood exposure to lead in the US for far back as the 1970s was around 15 ug/dl, which was the peak, which may have only conferred .5-2 pt decline in IQ https://ourworldindata.org/exports/lead-blood-usa-children_v4_850x600.svg https://ourworldindata.org/exports/lead-blood-usa-children_v... Also, this contradicted by Flynn effect, which shows IQs to be rising.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  This comment would be a lot more useful with a link to the specific study you're referring to, instead of a fairly vague hint of its existence.
  - leonry 5y ago
    Only tangentially related, but you may find the following little thread amusing: https://nitter.fdn.fr/literalbanana/status/1504154966998466562 https://nitter.fdn.fr/literalbanana/status/15041549669984665...
etaioinshrdlu 5y ago
Is there anything that can even be done to treat lead exposure long ago?
- jokoon 5y ago
  Chelating treatments, although I have no idea how they can be administered or used it if there are constraints to their use. I think it's unavailable at the pharmacy. I remember because the molecule is quite funny it has some kind of slot to capture the lead atom.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  > The half-life of lead varies from about a month in blood, 1-1.5 months in soft tissue, and about 25-30 years in bone (ATSDR 2007). https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp13.pdf https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp13.pdf Even low lead levels in children can cause developmental issues. Not necessarily abnormalities, but possible issues vary widely.
cpach 5y ago
Discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30600539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30600539
wpietri 5y ago
> This amounted to a total loss of 824,097,690 IQ points, disproportionately endured by those born between 1951 and 1980 That is interesting, but what I really wonder about is more subtle cognitive effects. Did it make people meaner? More easily led? Less collaborative? And as previously discussed here, lead was a known toxin when leaded gas was invented: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-invented-180961368/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-... Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508
- Alex3917 5y ago
  At the risk of stating the obvious, IQ points aren't a measure and adding them up doesn't yield a meaningful number. It's like adding up the numbers on football player's jerseys; if the total of a team's numbers goes up, that doesn't make the team better. Similarly, a reduction in the total amount of "IQ points lost" could easily correspond to more damage to cognitive intelligence caused by lead exposure.
  - paulpauper 5y ago
    you are comparing something entirely cosmetic to something that is predictive and of real consequence
  - wpietri 5y ago
    If you're looking for a sports analogy, I think it's sort of like "change in total seconds it takes the players to run the 100-yard dash". Not directly tied to success, and in some sense a pretty arbitrary measure, but a number that's nonetheless concerning to see get worse. I agree IQ is a pretty bad measure. And if you would like to go back and redo this study with a better one, I'm sure we (and this study's authors) would be grateful for the result. But since it's the measure we have, I'd say it's better than nothing, and this factoid is a good way to spark interest in the scale of the phenomenon.
    - throwaway1777 5y ago
ivanech 5y ago
Posted this in another thread about lead exposure: the Lead Exposure Elimination Project (https://leadelimination.org/ https://leadelimination.org/) is an organization that's working to solve the problem of lead exposure internationally. I've been giving money on a monthly basis and have been blown away by their progress.
pgt 5y ago
Does lead exposure cause autism?
radycov 5y ago
Well that explains a lot. Seriously though, for a wealthy first world nation the levels intellectual rational debate in America is generally pretty shockingly poor.
aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
A lot of companies don’t hire people who were born before leaded gasoline was banned. For many roles with high mental load it’s seen as a liability.
chrismsimpson 5y ago
Explains so much

140 points by nabla9 5y ago

Does anyone know if lead levels matter much in adulthood? Found out my local water had lead, old municipal pipes. Drank it about ten years. Or possibly just two. Either way, wondering if I should be concerned or do anything beyond filtering the water (which I do now)

joecool1029 5y ago
Provided the municipality treats their water correctly the lead should not dissolve into the water. Did you actually have the lead levels tested in the water? If you're concerned get a blood test for lead levels. No level is good for you but adult exposure is magnitudes less damaging than early childhood (while brain is still developing).
ohazi 5y ago
Where?
- graeme 5y ago
  Montreal. Lots of old pipes. They sent city workers to check, determined my unit’s levels were high and gave me a filter. Planning work in a few years.
sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
lead exposure makes people dumb af and mentally ill
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Crude, poor delivery but you may be on to something. I am curious if this is why you see generational differences in mental models and belief systems (there is data showing an inverse relationship between religiosity and intelligence [1] [2]), and why younger, healthier cohorts operate with different mental models. Riffing, if younger cohorts are healthier, you’d expect their average/aggregate cognitive ability to be higher, leading to social stratification. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23921675/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23921675/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
  - erikpukinskis 5y ago
    I’m sure lead levels have some effect, but how do you control for “they grew up in a completely different world”? I’d assume the latter is the primary cause of any major behavior differences, absent some pretty breathtaking science showing otherwise. “Intelligence” is also a pretty goofy measure. If we’re talking about IQ, it’s basically “what quiz questions predict success measures, as defined by the social norms of whoever made the test”. IMO that’s a pretty sketchy way to define intelligence. Certainly not the way I think about it colloquially. To me, success and intelligence are loosely correlated but very different traits.
kodah 5y ago
People have a lot of misconceptions about water infrastructure. Approximately 6-10M lead service lines still exist in today's world. (https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/lead-service-line-replacement https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/lead-ser...) Most of that is kept away from you by treating water with a chemical that causes a rust layer to form over the lead, preventing it from getting into the water at dangerous levels. Phosphates are typically used for this purpose. (https://alliancewater.com/why-the-us-still-has-lead-service-lines-and-pipes/ https://alliancewater.com/why-the-us-still-has-lead-service-...) Cities do screw this up, as evidenced in Flint and other areas. Not all filters are designed to remove heavy metals or lead, so you need to be picking a filter based on that. (https://www.consumerreports.org/water-filters/make-sure-your-water-filter-removes-lead-a5825432948/ https://www.consumerreports.org/water-filters/make-sure-your...) There's also other stuff in the water, so picking the right filter for your area is important. Whether you're an adult or a child lead poisoning is equally dangerous (https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/lead-poisoning/symptoms-causes/syc-20354717 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/lead-poisonin...). It is something that can be tested for though.
- 01100011 5y ago
  I wonder what happens after, say, an earthquake? Can pipes bend enough to cause cracks in the passivated layer and temporarily increase lead levels?
  - kodah 5y ago
    Yeah, they probably could, but the phosphates are always in the water so it'll reform and the amount of lead that gets into the water when disbursed is pretty low ppm (parts per million). The fundamental problem is that this infrastructure is costly to dig up and replace, and the key word here is "service lines". Those are the lines consumers are responsible for paying for. Cities that have lead lines should be working with the EPA to set milestones and goals for yearly replacements with federal funding though.
- graeme 5y ago
  To clarify: the measured levels from my tap were high, though not crazy high. High enough the city gave a filter to local residents and said not to drink the water from the tap. 7 micrograms per litre, legal limit 5. This was after running the water for a few min.
Spooky23 5y ago
Generally speaking, it’s not something to freak out about. Usually lead is found in the service lines from the main to your house. Unless the people who run your water utility are criminally negligent (ie. Flint, MI), you’re fine. Run the water for a few seconds before you drink it in the morning to flush out sediment, and if you’re worried, use a filter. Your water utility is required to test and publish results - look at those as well to understand if there is anything to worry about.
xattt 5y ago
I recently petitioned my local councillor to have my service line replaced at cost to the city. My only expense was to hire a plumber to do the connection to the house (several hundred bucks); digging was covered by them.

verelo 5y ago

I recall as a kid, soldering circuit boards. I distinctly remember the label "low lead" and also the smell of the smoke it made. At times, and this is stupid, i would find myself chewing on a piece of the unburnt solder as i debugged a circuit board. Mistakes were made...

emteycz 5y ago
When I was a kid, I explicitly didn't use non-leaded solder because I liked the smell of the leaded one. Mistakes indeed
- bushbaba 5y ago
  I too used leaded solder. But only because it was easier to use than the lead free versions
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  I mostly used lead-free solder as a kid (1990's and 2000's) but I still recall the acrid smell of flux fumes. I've accidentally had a few good whiffs that left me recoiling and coughing a bit. I wonder if that'll have any long term effects...
- jacobolus 5y ago
  The fumes from non-leaded solder are worse for you (make sure to have good ventilation). The lead doesn’t go into the air; the fumes are from flux. As long as you don’t eat the solder, and wash your hands after soldering, there’s no problem with hobby soldering using lead solder. The reason to prefer lead-free solder is primarily because at industrial scale with tons of trashed electronics the lead becomes an environmental pollutant. For hobbyists, lead solder is easier to work with, and not a serious risk.
  - klyrs 5y ago
    Pretty safe bet that kids playing with lead solder didn't wash their hands afterwards.
5y ago

_yo2u 5y ago

Curious if theres any data on how US compares to other countries

bcrosby95 5y ago
This would be interesting to see - considering most European countries banned lead paint long before the US, I would expect exposure rates to be lower.
- pkaye 5y ago
  For leaded fuel, the European countries banned a few years after US so there was still some exposure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Phaseout_and_ban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Phaseout_and_ba...

csee 5y ago

Practically, what should one do to avoid lead poisoning here and now? Lead petrol is banned. Lead paint is banned. Lead pipes are a problem in some areas, but let's assume we don't live in these areas. What do we need to look out for?

micromacrofoot 5y ago
another one: get your soil tested, don’t wear your shoes in your house
- goodpoint 5y ago
  > don’t wear your shoes in your house This is good advice for many other contaminants as well.
jeffbee 5y ago
Paint chips are the main thing. Don’t needlessly demolish anything and if you do, do it right, with containment and wet cleanup. And, ideally, a trained and licensed crew. Don’t let your neighbors DIY exterior painting, scraping, or demolition, or do it with a fly-by-night unlicensed contractor and no permits. Don’t let your kids chew on the window sills. Don’t garden for food without thinking about it first.
- mindslight 5y ago
  > Don’t let your neighbors DIY exterior painting, scraping, or demolition WTF? Yes, go ahead and advocate responsible techniques. But if you're the type of meddling busybody that harasses others just for working on their own homes, don't be surprised when nobody listens to you.
  - csee 5y ago
    Negative externalities between neighbors is a thing. See noise pollution.
    - 5y ago

Teknoman117 5y ago

A bit of clarification that was something that didn't occur to me immediately from the title: The article is that half of the living US population was exposed to adverse lead levels as a child, not that half of US children today are exposed to adverse lead levels.

JoeAltmaier 5y ago
Makes sense. We had it lying around when I was a kid (in the 1960's). We used to make impressions in clay with ordinary objects then fire up the shop gas torch, melt lead chunks in a forge pot, and pour it into our clay molds! It cooled in seconds, you could break the clay and have a lead toy. Fun!
- spdegabrielle 5y ago
  I can’t find the reference but I’m pretty sure the majority of childhood lead exposure was via leaded fuel in cars.
- narag 5y ago
  In the 70s I made a pair of barbells melting 15 kg of the pipes that were replaced. Definitely fun!

holidayacct 5y ago

I'm from a family that has been in real estate since the 80s. Lead remediation was a mandatory requirement in the late 70s. There is almost no lead anywhere in the country except for cities where there were old industrial manufacturing plants or places where there was illegal dumping of materials. You literally can't sell a home or purchase a home with lead issues because no one will purchase the property. There are exceptions where people are gaming the system by controlling the property and town inspection departments but largely lead paint poisoning is an old problem that was solved a long time ago. The only reason children would have a drastic decreae in IQ is going to be a combination of Television and internet usage at extremely young ages which has deleterious affects on will-power, attentional focus, judgement, memory and visuo-spatial analysis. The lead argument really needs to go away it keeps popping up and it is literally impossible in most of the country.

monocasa 5y ago
I can tell you that lots of houses weren't remediated like you'd expect. An extra layer of paint, and now 50 years on since the 70s both are chipping sort of thing.
- mikeyouse 5y ago
  Yeah OP is completely wrong. There is tons of lead paint on the walls in just about every city in the US. Remediation has been completely ad hoc and the restrictions on selling a house with lead paint are almost always a single sheet o paper that says “Sign here to acknowledge that there may be lead paint.”
wpietri 5y ago
It amazes me how long "the new thing has ruined the children" has been a trope. You manage to combine two generations of it. Television started ruining children when the Boomers were growing up. The Millennials were ruined by the early internet. And now I hear the Zoomers are being ruined by TikTok. (Presumably Gen X was ruined by cable TV, which you left out.) But that's just recently. The earliest iteration of this moral panic that I know of involved novels: https://www.economist.com/1843/2020/01/20/an-18th-century-moral-panic-sounds-surprisingly-familiar https://www.economist.com/1843/2020/01/20/an-18th-century-mo... That's right, the kids have been ruined since before America existed! Truly, it's amazing this steady worsening of the youth has not destroyed life as we know it.

paulpauper 5y ago

Whether it's increased crime or lowered IQ, lead is likely not as potent as the media hype would suggest. According to a meta study of lead vs. crime the results are inconclusive. Very high exposure to lead my cause a couple point reduction of childhood IQ, which may be temporary and not everyone exposed to lead has a reduced IQ. Regarding lead & IQ and lead & crime ,some links to studies (and the meta study): https://greyenlightenment.com/2021/08/02/the-effects-of-lead-exposure-on-crime-and-iq-likely-overstated/ https://greyenlightenment.com/2021/08/02/the-effects-of-lead... Also, the median childhood exposure to lead in the US for far back as the 1970s was around 15 ug/dl, which was the peak, which may have only conferred .5-2 pt decline in IQ https://ourworldindata.org/exports/lead-blood-usa-children_v4_850x600.svg https://ourworldindata.org/exports/lead-blood-usa-children_v... Also, this contradicted by Flynn effect, which shows IQs to be rising.

ceejayoz 5y ago
This comment would be a lot more useful with a link to the specific study you're referring to, instead of a fairly vague hint of its existence.
- leonry 5y ago
  Only tangentially related, but you may find the following little thread amusing: https://nitter.fdn.fr/literalbanana/status/1504154966998466562 https://nitter.fdn.fr/literalbanana/status/15041549669984665...

etaioinshrdlu 5y ago

Is there anything that can even be done to treat lead exposure long ago?

jokoon 5y ago
Chelating treatments, although I have no idea how they can be administered or used it if there are constraints to their use. I think it's unavailable at the pharmacy. I remember because the molecule is quite funny it has some kind of slot to capture the lead atom.
andrew_ 5y ago
> The half-life of lead varies from about a month in blood, 1-1.5 months in soft tissue, and about 25-30 years in bone (ATSDR 2007). https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp13.pdf https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp13.pdf Even low lead levels in children can cause developmental issues. Not necessarily abnormalities, but possible issues vary widely.

cpach 5y ago

Discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30600539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30600539

wpietri 5y ago

> This amounted to a total loss of 824,097,690 IQ points, disproportionately endured by those born between 1951 and 1980 That is interesting, but what I really wonder about is more subtle cognitive effects. Did it make people meaner? More easily led? Less collaborative? And as previously discussed here, lead was a known toxin when leaded gas was invented: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-invented-180961368/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-... Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508

Alex3917 5y ago
At the risk of stating the obvious, IQ points aren't a measure and adding them up doesn't yield a meaningful number. It's like adding up the numbers on football player's jerseys; if the total of a team's numbers goes up, that doesn't make the team better. Similarly, a reduction in the total amount of "IQ points lost" could easily correspond to more damage to cognitive intelligence caused by lead exposure.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  you are comparing something entirely cosmetic to something that is predictive and of real consequence
- wpietri 5y ago
  If you're looking for a sports analogy, I think it's sort of like "change in total seconds it takes the players to run the 100-yard dash". Not directly tied to success, and in some sense a pretty arbitrary measure, but a number that's nonetheless concerning to see get worse. I agree IQ is a pretty bad measure. And if you would like to go back and redo this study with a better one, I'm sure we (and this study's authors) would be grateful for the result. But since it's the measure we have, I'd say it's better than nothing, and this factoid is a good way to spark interest in the scale of the phenomenon.
  - throwaway1777 5y ago

ivanech 5y ago

Posted this in another thread about lead exposure: the Lead Exposure Elimination Project (https://leadelimination.org/ https://leadelimination.org/) is an organization that's working to solve the problem of lead exposure internationally. I've been giving money on a monthly basis and have been blown away by their progress.

pgt 5y ago

Does lead exposure cause autism?

radycov 5y ago

Well that explains a lot. Seriously though, for a wealthy first world nation the levels intellectual rational debate in America is generally pretty shockingly poor.

aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago

A lot of companies don’t hire people who were born before leaded gasoline was banned. For many roles with high mental load it’s seen as a liability.

chrismsimpson 5y ago

Explains so much