5 ms·

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 r

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
        Melbourne's general aviation airport (i.e. light planes like Cessnas) is Moorabbin, in the south east. The map shows the City of Kingston which contains it with a dark green dot, meaning safe. Planes often do a circuit south and then turn and follow the coast (over my house...) and all those places are shown as safe. The neighbouring City of Casey to the east is shown as unsafe, but this contains a "noxious industries area". Planes usually take off and land on a roughly north–south alignment because of the prevailing winds.
      - tialaramex 4y ago
        Only "avgas" which is basically the same stuff we used to put in cars and is running the same sort of engines, a piston engine, driving a propeller roughly the same way your car engine turns the wheels. Most little things, from smaller airports. JetA, which is basically kerosene (still terrible, don't drink it - but at least it doesn't have lead in it) is used by all the jet engines. That includes lots of things a casual observer wouldn't think of that way. A King Air, or a C-130, they've got propellers, but that's a turboprop engine, the propeller is spinning because there's a turbine behind it, and instead of kicking hot fast air out the back (like an A320) it's using that energy for turning the propeller really fast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboprop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboprop
    - OJFord 4y ago
      It was banned worldwide by the UN only last year. (And not, I think, for all aviation and perhaps other industry fuels, as sibling commenter says.) Also, 'leaded petrol still in London air 22 years after ban': https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-57564953 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-57564953
- klyrs 4y ago
  > you’re not ingesting the soil. You don't have kids, do you?
  - pygy_ 4y ago
    I suppose you're getting downvotes because of the snark, but you're right. Young kids will put anything in their mouths. Eating dirt is not an uncommon behavior.
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      And part of the reason kids are particularly susceptible to eating lead paint chips, is that lead acetate is sweet enough to be used as a sweetener in the olden days and called "sugar of lead".
    - klyrs 4y ago
      It's not snark, it's a logical deduction. It's not that my kid "eats" dirt but his dirt-covered hands are in his mouth if they're otherwise unoccupied.
  - giantg2 4y ago
    I highly doubt they're eating sufficient quantities to make any impact. They'd have to eat about 1/4 pound in the highest contaminated area to even hit the action level, assuming they fully absorb all the lead which isn't how it works.
    - klyrs 4y ago
      Over several years of playing in the muck every day before maturing past the tendency to eat dirt / cram dirty hands in mouth, 1/4 pound is just not that much. There is no "safe" level of lead exposure.
      - giantg2 4y ago
        "There is no "safe" level of lead exposure." And...? Do you think there's no exposure anywhere? This line, at least the way it's being used in arguments here, might as well be religion - used as a one line ideology that doesn't add anything to the discussion and ignores the realities. How is 1/4 pound of dirt not that much? And remember, they would have to eat multiple times that much to actually absorb 100% of lead in that amount. If you're really that concerned, then you shouldn't be letting them eat any dirt due to other health concerns, like toxoplasmosis.
giantg2 4y ago
Why would it be unsafe to live there at all? The cutoff for crops is typically 400 ppm. That seems like it would be low enough to live there.
- boplicity 4y ago
  There is no level of exposure to lead that is known to be without harmful effects. [1] Fortunately, plants don't seem to generally absorb lead.[2] It may be in the soil, though, which means you should carefully wash your plants before eating them. It does seem to be a big deal, though, that chickens absorb lead and that the lead ends up in their eggs. There are many people who have backyard chickens who likely aren't aware of this. [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... [2] https://extension.oregonstate.edu/gardening/soil-compost/should-i-worry-about-heavy-metals-my-garden-soil https://extension.oregonstate.edu/gardening/soil-compost/sho...
  - giantg2 4y ago
    Plants can absorb lead. This is especially true in poor, acidic soils, and for root vegetables. While there's no known safe level of lead, they do set action limits because effects under that level are not known or are negligible. It's also not practical to set a level of zero in many cases, such as soil levels for crops. So again, why would it be unsafe to simply live there? Where else would they live? Is there anywhere that is lead free (since the argument is that any level is unacceptable)? What level do you consider safe to live around?
    - selfhoster11 4y ago
      Does this mean that root vegetables as similar natural "lead absorbers" can be used to remove lead from the soil?
      - giantg2 4y ago
        It can. But it would likely be too slow and deplete the other nutrients. At that point, you might as well just replace the soil.
snickerbockers 4y ago
its more fair to say that food cultivated by professional farms who are held to strict safety standards is safer than food cultivated by you in your backyard that was never zoned for mass agriculture. IIRC, Michelle Obama even had some sort of community-garden project where she was growing vegetables on the White House lawn and giving it to local poor people but she had to quit after it was found out that they had toxic chemicals in them.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > food cultivated by you in your backyard that was never zoned for mass agriculture. The way you turned that around seems similar to "Free speech zones". So now we need official "Health Zones" where children can play safely and ordinary people can grow food as they've done for 12,000 years? Urban soil is poisoned in Australia. Let's not make excuses or try to hide behind fancy interpretations.
- 300bps 4y ago
  Wow, you apparently recall correctly: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/02/michelle-obama-vegetable-garden-lead https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/02/michelle-obama...
- eatonphil 4y ago
  Dumb question: is replacing the soil not an option? Too expensive? But surely that's amortized quickly over the term you use the garden? Or maybe you can't fully replace it because the soil is permeable and the lead comes from somewhere else (lower in the ground, rain, etc.)?
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    I guess it is from leaded petrol and paint which are forbidden now so replacing the garden soil should work to some extent? Unless there is water coming downhill from some neighbour.
  - AlanYx 4y ago
    Replacing the top layer of soil is the most common method of soil remediation, but there are others. For most urban gardeners it's usually more cost-effective to put in raised beds.
rstuart4133 4y ago
> a more appropriate title for the article would be "urban Australia is so lead-polluted that gardening and raising chickens shows lead poisoning". As an Australian resident of one of the cities mentioned in the article who has three chooks we keep for eggs, my take would be a little different. I had trouble squaring these statements in the article: > The average level of lead in eggs from the backyard chickens in our study was 301µg/kg. .... Some 51% of the eggs we analysed exceeded the 100µg/kg “food safety” threshold. 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. with the maps. How did they get an average of 301ug/kg when most of the area covered by the maps were below the safe level? Naturally I looked very closely at the maps to see if my suburb was in a high lead area. It wasn't included by the maps at all, so I looked for a pattern I could extrapolate from. Only the inner suburbs were above the 117mg/kg level. My house is a long way away from an inner suburb. Why the inner suburbs? The article hints at one reason - houses painted with lead paint. Another one sprang to mind - areas with high vehicle density when lead petrol was a thing, but the areas are so small the paint explanation seems a better fit. In Australia, most lead paint ceased to be sold in 1970. In comparison, Wikipedia says the USA dropped lead paint in 1997, EU formally banned lead paint 2003 (but phase outs happened much earlier in most places, eg UK in 1980), India in 2016. It's probably obvious to most Australian's, but those maps are misleading for another reason. Australian cities are huge and those maps only cover a small faction of where people live. If indeed it is only the very inner suburbs that are effected, it really is a small portion. Add to that backyards aren't a thing in the CBD, let alone backyard egg laying chooks, and I doubt too many people are effected. That said, I suspect the article has put all egg laying chooks in Mount Isa in mortal danger.
- edmcnulty101 4y ago
  I'd be curious to have a lab test your eggs and see how poor this reporting is.
- michaelmior 4y ago
  > How did they get an average of 301ug/kg when most of the area covered by the maps were below the safe level? Presumably outliers with much higher concentration.

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
      Melbourne's general aviation airport (i.e. light planes like Cessnas) is Moorabbin, in the south east. The map shows the City of Kingston which contains it with a dark green dot, meaning safe. Planes often do a circuit south and then turn and follow the coast (over my house...) and all those places are shown as safe. The neighbouring City of Casey to the east is shown as unsafe, but this contains a "noxious industries area". Planes usually take off and land on a roughly north–south alignment because of the prevailing winds.
    - tialaramex 4y ago
      Only "avgas" which is basically the same stuff we used to put in cars and is running the same sort of engines, a piston engine, driving a propeller roughly the same way your car engine turns the wheels. Most little things, from smaller airports. JetA, which is basically kerosene (still terrible, don't drink it - but at least it doesn't have lead in it) is used by all the jet engines. That includes lots of things a casual observer wouldn't think of that way. A King Air, or a C-130, they've got propellers, but that's a turboprop engine, the propeller is spinning because there's a turbine behind it, and instead of kicking hot fast air out the back (like an A320) it's using that energy for turning the propeller really fast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboprop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboprop
  - OJFord 4y ago
    It was banned worldwide by the UN only last year. (And not, I think, for all aviation and perhaps other industry fuels, as sibling commenter says.) Also, 'leaded petrol still in London air 22 years after ban': https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-57564953 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-57564953
klyrs 4y ago
> you’re not ingesting the soil. You don't have kids, do you?
- pygy_ 4y ago
  I suppose you're getting downvotes because of the snark, but you're right. Young kids will put anything in their mouths. Eating dirt is not an uncommon behavior.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    And part of the reason kids are particularly susceptible to eating lead paint chips, is that lead acetate is sweet enough to be used as a sweetener in the olden days and called "sugar of lead".
  - klyrs 4y ago
    It's not snark, it's a logical deduction. It's not that my kid "eats" dirt but his dirt-covered hands are in his mouth if they're otherwise unoccupied.
- giantg2 4y ago
  I highly doubt they're eating sufficient quantities to make any impact. They'd have to eat about 1/4 pound in the highest contaminated area to even hit the action level, assuming they fully absorb all the lead which isn't how it works.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    Over several years of playing in the muck every day before maturing past the tendency to eat dirt / cram dirty hands in mouth, 1/4 pound is just not that much. There is no "safe" level of lead exposure.
    - giantg2 4y ago
      "There is no "safe" level of lead exposure." And...? Do you think there's no exposure anywhere? This line, at least the way it's being used in arguments here, might as well be religion - used as a one line ideology that doesn't add anything to the discussion and ignores the realities. How is 1/4 pound of dirt not that much? And remember, they would have to eat multiple times that much to actually absorb 100% of lead in that amount. If you're really that concerned, then you shouldn't be letting them eat any dirt due to other health concerns, like toxoplasmosis.

giantg2 4y ago

Why would it be unsafe to live there at all? The cutoff for crops is typically 400 ppm. That seems like it would be low enough to live there.

boplicity 4y ago
There is no level of exposure to lead that is known to be without harmful effects. [1] Fortunately, plants don't seem to generally absorb lead.[2] It may be in the soil, though, which means you should carefully wash your plants before eating them. It does seem to be a big deal, though, that chickens absorb lead and that the lead ends up in their eggs. There are many people who have backyard chickens who likely aren't aware of this. [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... [2] https://extension.oregonstate.edu/gardening/soil-compost/should-i-worry-about-heavy-metals-my-garden-soil https://extension.oregonstate.edu/gardening/soil-compost/sho...
- giantg2 4y ago
  Plants can absorb lead. This is especially true in poor, acidic soils, and for root vegetables. While there's no known safe level of lead, they do set action limits because effects under that level are not known or are negligible. It's also not practical to set a level of zero in many cases, such as soil levels for crops. So again, why would it be unsafe to simply live there? Where else would they live? Is there anywhere that is lead free (since the argument is that any level is unacceptable)? What level do you consider safe to live around?
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    Does this mean that root vegetables as similar natural "lead absorbers" can be used to remove lead from the soil?
    - giantg2 4y ago
      It can. But it would likely be too slow and deplete the other nutrients. At that point, you might as well just replace the soil.

snickerbockers 4y ago

its more fair to say that food cultivated by professional farms who are held to strict safety standards is safer than food cultivated by you in your backyard that was never zoned for mass agriculture. IIRC, Michelle Obama even had some sort of community-garden project where she was growing vegetables on the White House lawn and giving it to local poor people but she had to quit after it was found out that they had toxic chemicals in them.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
> food cultivated by you in your backyard that was never zoned for mass agriculture. The way you turned that around seems similar to "Free speech zones". So now we need official "Health Zones" where children can play safely and ordinary people can grow food as they've done for 12,000 years? Urban soil is poisoned in Australia. Let's not make excuses or try to hide behind fancy interpretations.
300bps 4y ago
Wow, you apparently recall correctly: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/02/michelle-obama-vegetable-garden-lead https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/02/michelle-obama...
eatonphil 4y ago
Dumb question: is replacing the soil not an option? Too expensive? But surely that's amortized quickly over the term you use the garden? Or maybe you can't fully replace it because the soil is permeable and the lead comes from somewhere else (lower in the ground, rain, etc.)?
- rightbyte 4y ago
  I guess it is from leaded petrol and paint which are forbidden now so replacing the garden soil should work to some extent? Unless there is water coming downhill from some neighbour.
- AlanYx 4y ago
  Replacing the top layer of soil is the most common method of soil remediation, but there are others. For most urban gardeners it's usually more cost-effective to put in raised beds.

rstuart4133 4y ago

> a more appropriate title for the article would be "urban Australia is so lead-polluted that gardening and raising chickens shows lead poisoning". As an Australian resident of one of the cities mentioned in the article who has three chooks we keep for eggs, my take would be a little different. I had trouble squaring these statements in the article: > The average level of lead in eggs from the backyard chickens in our study was 301µg/kg. .... Some 51% of the eggs we analysed exceeded the 100µg/kg “food safety” threshold. 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. with the maps. How did they get an average of 301ug/kg when most of the area covered by the maps were below the safe level? Naturally I looked very closely at the maps to see if my suburb was in a high lead area. It wasn't included by the maps at all, so I looked for a pattern I could extrapolate from. Only the inner suburbs were above the 117mg/kg level. My house is a long way away from an inner suburb. Why the inner suburbs? The article hints at one reason - houses painted with lead paint. Another one sprang to mind - areas with high vehicle density when lead petrol was a thing, but the areas are so small the paint explanation seems a better fit. In Australia, most lead paint ceased to be sold in 1970. In comparison, Wikipedia says the USA dropped lead paint in 1997, EU formally banned lead paint 2003 (but phase outs happened much earlier in most places, eg UK in 1980), India in 2016. It's probably obvious to most Australian's, but those maps are misleading for another reason. Australian cities are huge and those maps only cover a small faction of where people live. If indeed it is only the very inner suburbs that are effected, it really is a small portion. Add to that backyards aren't a thing in the CBD, let alone backyard egg laying chooks, and I doubt too many people are effected. That said, I suspect the article has put all egg laying chooks in Mount Isa in mortal danger.

edmcnulty101 4y ago
I'd be curious to have a lab test your eggs and see how poor this reporting is.
michaelmior 4y ago
> How did they get an average of 301ug/kg when most of the area covered by the maps were below the safe level? Presumably outliers with much higher concentration.