> 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 Austr

> 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.