13 ms·

Backyard hens’ eggs contain 40 times more lead on average than shop eggs

112 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

tmikaeld 4y ago
Interesting, makes me question if the local farms here the EU are checked for lead amount in the blood.
- rob74 4y ago
  I mean, even local farms are usually in rural areas, where the lead contamination is probably much less than in the inner cities studied by this article. Still, I wonder where the lead originally came from? Old deposits from leaded gasoline fumes? Or does it come from lead paint, lead roofing, lead pipes or similar?
  - tmikaeld 4y ago
    Not sure why I was downvoted, but it doesn't look good in the EU either. https://europepmc.org/article/MED/30204015 https://europepmc.org/article/MED/30204015 I think it's from paint the chickens pick on, fallen off older farm houses, it wasn't uncommon in the 60-70s. https://www.familyhandyman.com/list/ways-to-minimize-lead-paint-exposure-and-avoid-paint-poisoning-in-older-homes/ https://www.familyhandyman.com/list/ways-to-minimize-lead-pa...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sha256sum 4y ago
> We assessed trace metal contamination in backyard chickens and their eggs from garden soils across 55 Sydney homes. We also explored other possible sources of contamination such as animal drinking water and chicken feed. I’m not surprised this would be the case with chickens foraging yards in cities. The title should probably reflect that as I doubt this would be the case in a less urban environment.
- mauvehaus 4y ago
  If you have an old farmhouse on your rural property, it's highly likely that it was painted with lead-based paint at some point in its history. Likely many times, in fact. A lot of the soil contamination comes from lead paint flaking off as it weathers. Fortunately(ish), this is mostly confined to the adjacent areas. Given that you likely have more space in which to free range your chickens, the problem is now reduced to free ranging them away from the house. Arranging this is left as an exercise to the reader :-)
  - unlikelymordant 4y ago
    If people have dumped engine oil as a weed suppressant or just poured it out on the ground, youll get a lot of heavy metals including lead. Also leaded gasoline used to be popular, and would likely have been used for all sorts of things like an accelerant or a degreaser. It doesnt take many incidents like that over 50 years to spread lead all over the place.
    - partomniscient 4y ago
      And that's just the lead... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botany_Bay_Groundwater_Plume https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botany_Bay_Groundwater_Plume I don't know what's worse 'progress' with known costs and done anyway, or 'progress' done in ignorance (sometimes rather intentionally). It's the future's problem - not ours. Welcome to said future.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      yeah, my understanding is that a significant portion of the urban lead contamination is from automobile exhaust. This is a much better explanation than some paint chips. I do wonder about the contribution from leaded piping. If you imagine many decades of garden irrigation, it seems that some accumulation would be expected. Another consideration is if there were ever any coal plants in the area.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    Even more concerning is that a large # of rural properties are on old apple orchards. Spraying lead arsenate as a pesticide on apples was a fairly common practice up until the 60s. It accumulates in the soil and never goes away. The scale of the problem isn't spoken about much because there's literally nothing that can be done about it.
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
I wondered how much the chickens may have been concentrating the lead and if it was significant compared with the extra lead the owners of those chickens are being exposed to from their city home environment. But this article suggests that air lead pollution is not an issue: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-09/lead-pollution-threat-air-quality-major-australian-cities/8396782 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-09/lead-pollution-threat...
- danjoredd 4y ago
  Its almost as if...there is a bias in the media in favor of the egg and gas industry. No...don't raise your own eggs. Buy OUR eggs! They are safer, and don't contain lead like yours! Oh, the lead in the air is more dangerous? No, you are being paranoid.
sudden_dystopia 4y ago
Had me a bit freaked out until I saw that this was due to tainted soil in urban settings. I’m sure there is still lead at lower concentrations pretty much everywhere considering it was in our gasoline for so long. But the title should probably be more like the eggs of free range hens in urban setting contain 40x lead than chickens confined to a tiny box.
- causi 4y ago
  Had me a bit freaked out until I saw that this was due to tainted soil in urban settings. While that's true, what they determined to be dangerous levels are still low enough to be in the "zero to low" category for most other classifiers like universities. I wouldn't assume your soil is safe unless you have an actual measurement done.
causi 4y ago
To keep egg lead below 100μg/kg, our modelling of the relationship between lead in soil, chickens and eggs showed soil lead needs to be under 117mg/kg A good number to remember if you or anyone you know is considering getting chickens.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sudden_dystopia 4y ago
I wonder if this can be remediated by covering the chickens run in a deep layer of mulch and shredded leaves, letting that compost over time as the chickens poop and scratch in it. Over time the layer of contaminated soil could be buried deeper under fresh compost. I also wonder if you could innoculate the wood chips with a fungus whose mycelium could filter out the soil a bit.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Chickens scratch, seeking tiny rocks for their crop. If they don't find any in your overlayer, they go deeper.
  - Pigalowda 4y ago
    Maybe mix the mulch with some fine gravel
ncmncm 4y ago
Of course this will vary radically from one place to another. Perhaps most important may turn out to be how much lead paint has flaked off buildings in the area.
nomilk 4y ago
Is forty times an extremely small number still negligible? (asking not out of skepticism but curiousness)
- mirker 4y ago
  There isn’t an official safe exposure amount for lead [1]. [1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/lead-poisoning-and-health https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/lead-poison...
  - superb-owl 4y ago
    In the US there is: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/lead/limits.html https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/lead/limits.html
    - bardworx 4y ago
      This was an interesting bit from that link: > Some studies suggest that the current OSHA PEL and NIOSH REL may be too high to protect against certain health effects.
    - mmastrac 4y ago
      The line from the CDC page reads almost like a call for help: "Some studies suggest that the current OSHA PEL and NIOSH REL may be too high to protect against certain health effects"
    - nosianu 4y ago
      The medical limit for lead is zero (you can find that statement in various forms on all the major - official, main stream, government, education - sites that have something to say about the subject). The reason we have non-zero "official" threshold values is for practical reasons: In our times and on this earth right now it simply is not possible. The values are set so that medical people are kind of okay with it - any damages are too subtle and not too obvious (e.g. less IQ as well as most small issues nicely also correlate with age so it can always be attributed to aging, and proving for an individual (and not just statistically for a lot of people without being able to say anything about each individual) that some issue was caused by or was contributed to by e.g. lead is impossible (we can't tag all the atoms and follow them around and see what they do, and even if we could do the first part perfectly, the following those atoms, we still would not know what they actually do just from knowing where they've been, even less so how the local bio-chemistry deals with consequences longer term than we can observe). So we need to have a limit that is low enough to not cause medical alarm bells to go off, but high enough to not bankrupt government and industry if they were told they had to clean it all up. Which, quite frankly, they can't at this point. Last time I heard about China they have an already huge and increasing problem with heavy metals on large parts of their agricultural lands... (Example, two links of many randomly chosen: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6239058/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6239058/ or https://www.chinawaterrisk.org/resources/analysis-reviews/heavy-metals-agriculture/ https://www.chinawaterrisk.org/resources/analysis-reviews/he...) and the West had a lot of time where nobody cared about pollution one bit, during and after industrial revolution. The "superfund sites" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites) are just the biggest concentrations. Oh and then there's coal - burning it also has been releasing heavy metals such as mercury for a long time, and it's still going on. Oh and by the way, please nobody blame "capitalism". I grew up in East Germany, near ash mountains and a river clearly unsuitable to even be touched by a human, everything was dirty and gray. I did not even live in one of the known polluted places (e.g. Bitterfeld). After reunification everything was cleaned up with Western money and methods - ash mountains gone, the river is clear and has nice water plants showing it's really healthy, etc. East Germany under capitalism is A LOT cleaner than under socialism. I say this because in sooo many discussions about the environment always somebody blames capitalism, but it's deeper and orthogonal to whatever system is used I think. People do or don't care about their environment, if it was just about economic pressure, you have them in all systems, because all systems need to produce something.
anm89 4y ago
All, large cities are filthy, contaminated places. You shouldn't be growing food in random soil you find lying around in them and you shouldn't be raising animals in that soil unless you are carefully managing the sources and exposure of everything.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  In old neighborhoods in the US (anything over a century is old in the US) you find the craziest things in the soil. The sheer amount of glass and plastic and metal is staggering. Just digging the holes for ornamental plants was enough to make me realize all food gardening would need to be in raised beds with liners and known soil. In parts of the world with longer periods of habitation (all of them) what do you find in the soil?
rob74 4y ago
[in Australian cities]
rossdavidh 4y ago
So, while the impact on eggs is interesting and all, a more appropriate title for the article would be "urban Australia is so lead-polluted that gardening and raising chickens shows lead poisoning". In other words, if the place you're living has so much lead in the soil that it is unsafe to produce food there, it seems unlikely that it is safe to be living there at all.
- duxup 4y ago
  > it seems unlikely that it is safe to be living there at all Is it? Just living there you’re not ingesting the soil.
  - hkt 4y ago
    In all likelihood it is reaching the soil through the air as particulates.
    - primax 4y ago
      Leaded petrol was banned decades ago
      - heretoo 4y ago
        There is still aviation fuel using lead.
        giantg2 4y ago
        True, but unless you live really close to a busy airport, I doubt it's an issue. I live fairly close to a rural grass strip that sees moderate use. I have about 40ppm which is 10x less than the allowed limit for crops. It sounds like accumulation from lead based paint and leaded car gas is the issue in the article. Which makes sense since you generally can't fly low over cities anyways (disperses) and small planes are not huge emitters (low in numbers).
        SulphurCrested 4y ago
wolongong942 4y ago
Does anybody know whether fruit & vegetables can contain lead if all external matter is 100% removed or peeled off? i.e do plants suck this stuff up? my parents grow fruit and vegges at home and we live next to a road in a fairly old neighborhood..
- huffmsa 4y ago
  Plants don't typically pull lead out of the soil through their roots. Your main concern should be surface contamination from soil getting splashed onto the plant when it's watered / rains
  - danjoredd 4y ago
    This is why one always rinses plants off before consumption.
- kaikai 4y ago
  Sunflowers are known bioaccumulators.
- jefftk 4y ago
  Here's the standard advice: https://extension.oregonstate.edu/gardening/soil-compost/should-i-worry-about-heavy-metals-my-garden-soil https://extension.oregonstate.edu/gardening/soil-compost/sho... If soil lead is sufficiently high, leafy greens and root vegetables are not recommended.
micromacrofoot 4y ago
amazing how much damage cars have done in 100 years
motohagiography 4y ago
- tristor 4y ago
  It does seem like several major organizations are trying to push people towards alternative protein sources. There might be something good about that, but honestly, it's going to lead in a decline of quality of life. The reality is simply that the quality of life the average person has come to expect in the West is not sustainable to be achieved for the entire global population while meeting the realities of climate change. So only one of two outcomes is possible if we don't want to make our species extinct: 1. reduce quality of life or 2. further segment society and increase exploitation. A whole lot of people think #2 is bad, so are choosing #1 as the only viable option. A more cynical take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_8LTUmHWP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_8LTUmHWP0
  - kiba 4y ago
    I don't see the idea of 'alternative protein sources' as necessarily a decline in the quality of life.
    - nine_k 4y ago
      It's not adding an alternative source that feels bad. It's the removal (by becoming too expensive) of the customary source, that is, cows (and sheep, and even pigs).
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    I sometimes compare Climate Change to the US Civil War, in terms of a few rich people owning the slaves/fossil fuels and not being ready to give that up, and while I'm less worried about it now than I have been in the past, I did think a really big war was a real possibility and I still wouldn't totally rule it out. This kind of thinking, is exactly the propaganda you'd use if you personally had a big incentive for an inefficient system to continue, but needed a lot of other people to fight and die in order to have any slim chance of coming out ahead of the future changes. To get less melodramatic and more boringly factual: a carbon tax would increase our quality of life, spur economic growth and generally be good for everyone who hasn't put their life savings into fossil fuels. The fact that people are so worried about quality of life, but refuse to absorb that simple fact is a worry.
throwaway0a5e 4y ago
>117mg/kg God forbid the authors spend 60sec to transform the unit into something that is easily visualize-able to the general public. That should be SOP when writing and editing these kinds of press releases. Density of typical soil is around 1250kg/m^3 so 117mg/kg is ~146g/m^3. Density of lead is 1.34g/cm&^3 so ~146g/m^3 is 110cm^3 or roughly the size of a small container of cough syrup or 3-4 decent sized fishing weights per cubic meter of soil. That's a lot of lead but probably readily attainable under certain circumstances.
- shultays 4y ago
  roughly the size of a small container of cough syrup or 3-4 decent sized fishing weights per cubic meter of soil This does not mean anything to general public either thou. Is it high? Low? How high? The article says it should be 117mg/kg while guideline is 300mg/kg. Which is pretty clear to me.
ccbccccbbcccbb 4y ago
Translating this from agendese to plain English: We don't want backyard producers to compete with any of our product lines. We want to feed the population with what we deem healthy for them, and prevent them from deviating from our approved diet.
hyperboreanChad 4y ago
g8oz 4y ago
Looking at the actual numbers it seems like the suburbs are a safe enough place to raise the chickens compared to the older inner core of these Australian cities.
norwalkbear 4y ago
Get a lead test for your backyards then, and raise your chickens with peace of mind
photochemsyn 4y ago
Mushrooms found growing anywhere near cities or suburbs should also never be consumed, as they specialize in concentrating heavy metals from soils. The most well-known example is the radioactive mushrooms of Chernobyl, which end up eaten by wild boars in the region (and boars don't stay in one place): https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/24/14733094/radioactive-pigs-boars-czech-republic-central-europe-germany-chernobyl https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/24/14733094/radioactive-pigs... In cities and suburbs the main problem is likely due to the use of tetraethyl lead additives in gasoline for many decades (~1930s to ~1990s). Downwind of coal plants the mercury and arsenic are more problematic. Add both and some more industry and you end up with heavy metal cocktails that just recirculate endlessly. If you want to grow foods in cities, there is a solution - raised beds that are separate from the underlying dirt, filled with soil trucked in from rural farms that aren't adjacent to industrial pollution sources. Note also that some 'natural environments' have quite a bit of heavy metals and toxic elements, due to natural weathering from geological outcrops, and some plants in these environments accumulate such metals (nickel, arsenic, etc.). If you're concerned, sending a sample of your local soil to a testing lab is relatively inexpensive.
- the-alchemist 4y ago
  Mushrooms (to be more specific, only certain species) can be used to clean up dirty sites, since they absorb heavy metals so well. +1 for raised beds. +1 for testing. Here in the US, almost every college has a Cooperative Extension, and does soil testing. At Rutgers [1], it's just an extra $18 for lead testing. [1]: https://njaes.rutgers.edu/soil-testing-lab/services-fees.php https://njaes.rutgers.edu/soil-testing-lab/services-fees.php
anonymous344 4y ago
1. Lead is known to cause certain illnesses, for example cancer / kidney... ? 2. Now wow does the statistic looks like on a massive dataset for group of people eating more eggs than a median, have they got these diseases ??? yes: study has a valid point no: ignore the study, nobody keeps hens in the suburbs & small yard
- jefftk 4y ago
  The study isn't saying that this is a reason to avoid eggs in general, they're saying this is a reason to consider stopping eating eggs from urban backyard chickens.
  - caf 4y ago
    Or at least get your soil tested.
sethjr5rtfgh 4y ago
mercy_dude 4y ago
That makes me wonder - does human sperm or eggs show signs of lead poison as well? Has there been any studies on that?
simonsarris 4y ago
Insanely disingenuous to conflate "55 Sydney urban gardens" with "backyard" hens. This should be flagged.
TrispusAttucks 4y ago
Title could add "in urban Australia" to dissuade the idea that sustainable backyard chickens as a whole are a threat to public health.
dijon-concord 4y ago
Are there any known examples where evolution has produced a solution to a problem like this? I've heard of humans adapting to Malaria and lactose consumption in adulthood. Also, are there any organisms that don't experience lead as a toxic substance, at least in the way that humans do? That might point to adaptation plausibility.
churnedgodotdev 4y ago
Since many HN'ers live in the greater Seattle area, it's important to be aware of the Tacoma Smelter Plume: https://ecology.wa.gov/Spills-Cleanup/Contamination-cleanup/Cleanup-sites/Tacoma-smelter https://ecology.wa.gov/Spills-Cleanup/Contamination-cleanup/... For almost 100 years, the Asarco Company operated a copper smelter in Tacoma. Air pollution from the smelter settled on the surface soil of more than 1,000 square miles of the Puget Sound basin. Arsenic, lead, and other heavy metals are still in the soil as a result of this pollution.
- infinite8s 4y ago
  And for anyone in the East side of Toronto, there used to be a lead smelter that polluted the whole neighborhood - http://laurajones.ca/wp/?p=515 http://laurajones.ca/wp/?p=515
albatross13 4y ago
> noooo you can't just be self sufficient and have your own food, IT'S POISON > buy ours instead Nah, fuck you. I'll eat my lead eggs, thanks.

112 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

tmikaeld 4y ago

Interesting, makes me question if the local farms here the EU are checked for lead amount in the blood.

rob74 4y ago
I mean, even local farms are usually in rural areas, where the lead contamination is probably much less than in the inner cities studied by this article. Still, I wonder where the lead originally came from? Old deposits from leaded gasoline fumes? Or does it come from lead paint, lead roofing, lead pipes or similar?
- tmikaeld 4y ago
  Not sure why I was downvoted, but it doesn't look good in the EU either. https://europepmc.org/article/MED/30204015 https://europepmc.org/article/MED/30204015 I think it's from paint the chickens pick on, fallen off older farm houses, it wasn't uncommon in the 60-70s. https://www.familyhandyman.com/list/ways-to-minimize-lead-paint-exposure-and-avoid-paint-poisoning-in-older-homes/ https://www.familyhandyman.com/list/ways-to-minimize-lead-pa...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

sha256sum 4y ago

> We assessed trace metal contamination in backyard chickens and their eggs from garden soils across 55 Sydney homes. We also explored other possible sources of contamination such as animal drinking water and chicken feed. I’m not surprised this would be the case with chickens foraging yards in cities. The title should probably reflect that as I doubt this would be the case in a less urban environment.

mauvehaus 4y ago
If you have an old farmhouse on your rural property, it's highly likely that it was painted with lead-based paint at some point in its history. Likely many times, in fact. A lot of the soil contamination comes from lead paint flaking off as it weathers. Fortunately(ish), this is mostly confined to the adjacent areas. Given that you likely have more space in which to free range your chickens, the problem is now reduced to free ranging them away from the house. Arranging this is left as an exercise to the reader :-)
- unlikelymordant 4y ago
  If people have dumped engine oil as a weed suppressant or just poured it out on the ground, youll get a lot of heavy metals including lead. Also leaded gasoline used to be popular, and would likely have been used for all sorts of things like an accelerant or a degreaser. It doesnt take many incidents like that over 50 years to spread lead all over the place.
  - partomniscient 4y ago
    And that's just the lead... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botany_Bay_Groundwater_Plume https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botany_Bay_Groundwater_Plume I don't know what's worse 'progress' with known costs and done anyway, or 'progress' done in ignorance (sometimes rather intentionally). It's the future's problem - not ours. Welcome to said future.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    yeah, my understanding is that a significant portion of the urban lead contamination is from automobile exhaust. This is a much better explanation than some paint chips. I do wonder about the contribution from leaded piping. If you imagine many decades of garden irrigation, it seems that some accumulation would be expected. Another consideration is if there were ever any coal plants in the area.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Even more concerning is that a large # of rural properties are on old apple orchards. Spraying lead arsenate as a pesticide on apples was a fairly common practice up until the 60s. It accumulates in the soil and never goes away. The scale of the problem isn't spoken about much because there's literally nothing that can be done about it.

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

I wondered how much the chickens may have been concentrating the lead and if it was significant compared with the extra lead the owners of those chickens are being exposed to from their city home environment. But this article suggests that air lead pollution is not an issue: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-09/lead-pollution-threat-air-quality-major-australian-cities/8396782 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-09/lead-pollution-threat...

danjoredd 4y ago
Its almost as if...there is a bias in the media in favor of the egg and gas industry. No...don't raise your own eggs. Buy OUR eggs! They are safer, and don't contain lead like yours! Oh, the lead in the air is more dangerous? No, you are being paranoid.

sudden_dystopia 4y ago

Had me a bit freaked out until I saw that this was due to tainted soil in urban settings. I’m sure there is still lead at lower concentrations pretty much everywhere considering it was in our gasoline for so long. But the title should probably be more like the eggs of free range hens in urban setting contain 40x lead than chickens confined to a tiny box.

causi 4y ago
Had me a bit freaked out until I saw that this was due to tainted soil in urban settings. While that's true, what they determined to be dangerous levels are still low enough to be in the "zero to low" category for most other classifiers like universities. I wouldn't assume your soil is safe unless you have an actual measurement done.

causi 4y ago

To keep egg lead below 100μg/kg, our modelling of the relationship between lead in soil, chickens and eggs showed soil lead needs to be under 117mg/kg A good number to remember if you or anyone you know is considering getting chickens.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

sudden_dystopia 4y ago

I wonder if this can be remediated by covering the chickens run in a deep layer of mulch and shredded leaves, letting that compost over time as the chickens poop and scratch in it. Over time the layer of contaminated soil could be buried deeper under fresh compost. I also wonder if you could innoculate the wood chips with a fungus whose mycelium could filter out the soil a bit.

ncmncm 4y ago
Chickens scratch, seeking tiny rocks for their crop. If they don't find any in your overlayer, they go deeper.
- Pigalowda 4y ago
  Maybe mix the mulch with some fine gravel

ncmncm 4y ago

Of course this will vary radically from one place to another. Perhaps most important may turn out to be how much lead paint has flaked off buildings in the area.

nomilk 4y ago

Is forty times an extremely small number still negligible? (asking not out of skepticism but curiousness)

mirker 4y ago
There isn’t an official safe exposure amount for lead [1]. [1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/lead-poisoning-and-health https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/lead-poison...
- superb-owl 4y ago
  In the US there is: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/lead/limits.html https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/lead/limits.html
  - bardworx 4y ago
    This was an interesting bit from that link: > Some studies suggest that the current OSHA PEL and NIOSH REL may be too high to protect against certain health effects.
  - mmastrac 4y ago
    The line from the CDC page reads almost like a call for help: "Some studies suggest that the current OSHA PEL and NIOSH REL may be too high to protect against certain health effects"
  - nosianu 4y ago
    The medical limit for lead is zero (you can find that statement in various forms on all the major - official, main stream, government, education - sites that have something to say about the subject). The reason we have non-zero "official" threshold values is for practical reasons: In our times and on this earth right now it simply is not possible. The values are set so that medical people are kind of okay with it - any damages are too subtle and not too obvious (e.g. less IQ as well as most small issues nicely also correlate with age so it can always be attributed to aging, and proving for an individual (and not just statistically for a lot of people without being able to say anything about each individual) that some issue was caused by or was contributed to by e.g. lead is impossible (we can't tag all the atoms and follow them around and see what they do, and even if we could do the first part perfectly, the following those atoms, we still would not know what they actually do just from knowing where they've been, even less so how the local bio-chemistry deals with consequences longer term than we can observe). So we need to have a limit that is low enough to not cause medical alarm bells to go off, but high enough to not bankrupt government and industry if they were told they had to clean it all up. Which, quite frankly, they can't at this point. Last time I heard about China they have an already huge and increasing problem with heavy metals on large parts of their agricultural lands... (Example, two links of many randomly chosen: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6239058/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6239058/ or https://www.chinawaterrisk.org/resources/analysis-reviews/heavy-metals-agriculture/ https://www.chinawaterrisk.org/resources/analysis-reviews/he...) and the West had a lot of time where nobody cared about pollution one bit, during and after industrial revolution. The "superfund sites" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites) are just the biggest concentrations. Oh and then there's coal - burning it also has been releasing heavy metals such as mercury for a long time, and it's still going on. Oh and by the way, please nobody blame "capitalism". I grew up in East Germany, near ash mountains and a river clearly unsuitable to even be touched by a human, everything was dirty and gray. I did not even live in one of the known polluted places (e.g. Bitterfeld). After reunification everything was cleaned up with Western money and methods - ash mountains gone, the river is clear and has nice water plants showing it's really healthy, etc. East Germany under capitalism is A LOT cleaner than under socialism. I say this because in sooo many discussions about the environment always somebody blames capitalism, but it's deeper and orthogonal to whatever system is used I think. People do or don't care about their environment, if it was just about economic pressure, you have them in all systems, because all systems need to produce something.

anm89 4y ago

All, large cities are filthy, contaminated places. You shouldn't be growing food in random soil you find lying around in them and you shouldn't be raising animals in that soil unless you are carefully managing the sources and exposure of everything.

galangalalgol 4y ago
In old neighborhoods in the US (anything over a century is old in the US) you find the craziest things in the soil. The sheer amount of glass and plastic and metal is staggering. Just digging the holes for ornamental plants was enough to make me realize all food gardening would need to be in raised beds with liners and known soil. In parts of the world with longer periods of habitation (all of them) what do you find in the soil?

rob74 4y ago

[in Australian cities]

rossdavidh 4y ago

So, while the impact on eggs is interesting and all, a more appropriate title for the article would be "urban Australia is so lead-polluted that gardening and raising chickens shows lead poisoning". In other words, if the place you're living has so much lead in the soil that it is unsafe to produce food there, it seems unlikely that it is safe to be living there at all.

duxup 4y ago
> it seems unlikely that it is safe to be living there at all Is it? Just living there you’re not ingesting the soil.
- hkt 4y ago
  In all likelihood it is reaching the soil through the air as particulates.
  - primax 4y ago
    Leaded petrol was banned decades ago
    - heretoo 4y ago
      There is still aviation fuel using lead.
      - giantg2 4y ago
        True, but unless you live really close to a busy airport, I doubt it's an issue. I live fairly close to a rural grass strip that sees moderate use. I have about 40ppm which is 10x less than the allowed limit for crops. It sounds like accumulation from lead based paint and leaded car gas is the issue in the article. Which makes sense since you generally can't fly low over cities anyways (disperses) and small planes are not huge emitters (low in numbers).
      - SulphurCrested 4y ago

wolongong942 4y ago

Does anybody know whether fruit & vegetables can contain lead if all external matter is 100% removed or peeled off? i.e do plants suck this stuff up? my parents grow fruit and vegges at home and we live next to a road in a fairly old neighborhood..

huffmsa 4y ago
Plants don't typically pull lead out of the soil through their roots. Your main concern should be surface contamination from soil getting splashed onto the plant when it's watered / rains
- danjoredd 4y ago
  This is why one always rinses plants off before consumption.
kaikai 4y ago
Sunflowers are known bioaccumulators.
jefftk 4y ago
Here's the standard advice: https://extension.oregonstate.edu/gardening/soil-compost/should-i-worry-about-heavy-metals-my-garden-soil https://extension.oregonstate.edu/gardening/soil-compost/sho... If soil lead is sufficiently high, leafy greens and root vegetables are not recommended.

micromacrofoot 4y ago

amazing how much damage cars have done in 100 years

motohagiography 4y ago

tristor 4y ago
It does seem like several major organizations are trying to push people towards alternative protein sources. There might be something good about that, but honestly, it's going to lead in a decline of quality of life. The reality is simply that the quality of life the average person has come to expect in the West is not sustainable to be achieved for the entire global population while meeting the realities of climate change. So only one of two outcomes is possible if we don't want to make our species extinct: 1. reduce quality of life or 2. further segment society and increase exploitation. A whole lot of people think #2 is bad, so are choosing #1 as the only viable option. A more cynical take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_8LTUmHWP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_8LTUmHWP0
- kiba 4y ago
  I don't see the idea of 'alternative protein sources' as necessarily a decline in the quality of life.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    It's not adding an alternative source that feels bad. It's the removal (by becoming too expensive) of the customary source, that is, cows (and sheep, and even pigs).
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  I sometimes compare Climate Change to the US Civil War, in terms of a few rich people owning the slaves/fossil fuels and not being ready to give that up, and while I'm less worried about it now than I have been in the past, I did think a really big war was a real possibility and I still wouldn't totally rule it out. This kind of thinking, is exactly the propaganda you'd use if you personally had a big incentive for an inefficient system to continue, but needed a lot of other people to fight and die in order to have any slim chance of coming out ahead of the future changes. To get less melodramatic and more boringly factual: a carbon tax would increase our quality of life, spur economic growth and generally be good for everyone who hasn't put their life savings into fossil fuels. The fact that people are so worried about quality of life, but refuse to absorb that simple fact is a worry.

throwaway0a5e 4y ago

>117mg/kg God forbid the authors spend 60sec to transform the unit into something that is easily visualize-able to the general public. That should be SOP when writing and editing these kinds of press releases. Density of typical soil is around 1250kg/m^3 so 117mg/kg is ~146g/m^3. Density of lead is 1.34g/cm&^3 so ~146g/m^3 is 110cm^3 or roughly the size of a small container of cough syrup or 3-4 decent sized fishing weights per cubic meter of soil. That's a lot of lead but probably readily attainable under certain circumstances.

shultays 4y ago
roughly the size of a small container of cough syrup or 3-4 decent sized fishing weights per cubic meter of soil This does not mean anything to general public either thou. Is it high? Low? How high? The article says it should be 117mg/kg while guideline is 300mg/kg. Which is pretty clear to me.

ccbccccbbcccbb 4y ago

Translating this from agendese to plain English: We don't want backyard producers to compete with any of our product lines. We want to feed the population with what we deem healthy for them, and prevent them from deviating from our approved diet.

hyperboreanChad 4y ago

g8oz 4y ago

Looking at the actual numbers it seems like the suburbs are a safe enough place to raise the chickens compared to the older inner core of these Australian cities.

norwalkbear 4y ago

Get a lead test for your backyards then, and raise your chickens with peace of mind

photochemsyn 4y ago

Mushrooms found growing anywhere near cities or suburbs should also never be consumed, as they specialize in concentrating heavy metals from soils. The most well-known example is the radioactive mushrooms of Chernobyl, which end up eaten by wild boars in the region (and boars don't stay in one place): https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/24/14733094/radioactive-pigs-boars-czech-republic-central-europe-germany-chernobyl https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/24/14733094/radioactive-pigs... In cities and suburbs the main problem is likely due to the use of tetraethyl lead additives in gasoline for many decades (~1930s to ~1990s). Downwind of coal plants the mercury and arsenic are more problematic. Add both and some more industry and you end up with heavy metal cocktails that just recirculate endlessly. If you want to grow foods in cities, there is a solution - raised beds that are separate from the underlying dirt, filled with soil trucked in from rural farms that aren't adjacent to industrial pollution sources. Note also that some 'natural environments' have quite a bit of heavy metals and toxic elements, due to natural weathering from geological outcrops, and some plants in these environments accumulate such metals (nickel, arsenic, etc.). If you're concerned, sending a sample of your local soil to a testing lab is relatively inexpensive.

the-alchemist 4y ago
Mushrooms (to be more specific, only certain species) can be used to clean up dirty sites, since they absorb heavy metals so well. +1 for raised beds. +1 for testing. Here in the US, almost every college has a Cooperative Extension, and does soil testing. At Rutgers [1], it's just an extra $18 for lead testing. [1]: https://njaes.rutgers.edu/soil-testing-lab/services-fees.php https://njaes.rutgers.edu/soil-testing-lab/services-fees.php

anonymous344 4y ago

1. Lead is known to cause certain illnesses, for example cancer / kidney... ? 2. Now wow does the statistic looks like on a massive dataset for group of people eating more eggs than a median, have they got these diseases ??? yes: study has a valid point no: ignore the study, nobody keeps hens in the suburbs & small yard

jefftk 4y ago
The study isn't saying that this is a reason to avoid eggs in general, they're saying this is a reason to consider stopping eating eggs from urban backyard chickens.
- caf 4y ago
  Or at least get your soil tested.

sethjr5rtfgh 4y ago

mercy_dude 4y ago

That makes me wonder - does human sperm or eggs show signs of lead poison as well? Has there been any studies on that?

simonsarris 4y ago

Insanely disingenuous to conflate "55 Sydney urban gardens" with "backyard" hens. This should be flagged.

TrispusAttucks 4y ago

Title could add "in urban Australia" to dissuade the idea that sustainable backyard chickens as a whole are a threat to public health.

dijon-concord 4y ago

Are there any known examples where evolution has produced a solution to a problem like this? I've heard of humans adapting to Malaria and lactose consumption in adulthood. Also, are there any organisms that don't experience lead as a toxic substance, at least in the way that humans do? That might point to adaptation plausibility.

churnedgodotdev 4y ago

Since many HN'ers live in the greater Seattle area, it's important to be aware of the Tacoma Smelter Plume: https://ecology.wa.gov/Spills-Cleanup/Contamination-cleanup/Cleanup-sites/Tacoma-smelter https://ecology.wa.gov/Spills-Cleanup/Contamination-cleanup/... For almost 100 years, the Asarco Company operated a copper smelter in Tacoma. Air pollution from the smelter settled on the surface soil of more than 1,000 square miles of the Puget Sound basin. Arsenic, lead, and other heavy metals are still in the soil as a result of this pollution.

infinite8s 4y ago
And for anyone in the East side of Toronto, there used to be a lead smelter that polluted the whole neighborhood - http://laurajones.ca/wp/?p=515 http://laurajones.ca/wp/?p=515

albatross13 4y ago

> noooo you can't just be self sufficient and have your own food, IT'S POISON > buy ours instead Nah, fuck you. I'll eat my lead eggs, thanks.