Slashdot Mirror
Lead Exposure Kills Hundreds of Thousands of Adults Every Year in the US, Study Finds (theguardian.com)
Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: Last week, a massive new study concluded that lead is 10 times more dangerous than thought, and that past exposure now hastens one in every five U.S. deaths. Researchers at four North American universities, led by Bruce Lanphear, of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, studied the fate of 14,289 people whose blood had been tested in an official U.S. survey between 1988 and 1994. Four fifths of them had harbored levels of the toxic metal below what has, hitherto, been thought safe. The study found that deaths, especially from cardiovascular disease, increased markedly with exposure, even at the lowest levels. It concluded that lead kills 412,000 people a year -- accounting for 18% of all U.S. mortality, not much less than the 483,000 who perish as a result of smoking. The study has been published in the Lancet Public Health journal.
The study claims that nothing else had any measurable effect - once you filtered them out, the effect from lead was exactly the same. ...which does bring up a couple of small doubts. There are a number of things that SHOULD cause the amount of lead in your system to have an increased or decreased effect, at least on a detectable level.
While it's reasonable that very small doses of lead will have a negative effect, I'd like to see some followup on this one. They say "it causes more deaths," but how much? Ten years off your lifespan? Ten days? Somewhere in between?
It's in The Lancet, after all, and they have a bad habit of occasionally publishing something that's just flat wrong. Vaccines, anyone?
I actually would have modded this post up if it wasn't for the utterly irrelevant racism. Maybe you should get your tap water checked for lead.
Its just a normal aspect of society. We reject bad news on things we are (in general) directly familiar with, like or find useful. Lead is extremely useful. We like(d) cigarettes. We like sugar in our food.
And we will continue to be that way. I see people instantly reject studies that suggest marijuana in dangerous, or vaping. The people that most staunchly reject those studies tend to be the people that use those products. If we saw a study tomorrow that said potatoes were dangerous, the instant reaction would be that something must be wrong with the study.
Meanwhile, we collectively accept FUD on things we are less familiar with, like radiation/nuclear power (although X-Rays are fine). I remember how much of the public was afraid of microwave ovens for some time until we all got comfortable with them. Autonomous cars might be another example where FUD is readily accepted due to unfamiliarity.
Yes, there can be other factors like the tobacco industry interests that play into social reaction, but they were more easily successful in playing down health impacts of cigarettes because of a largely accepting society.
Paint starts to flake, particularly by windows where sunlight comes in. Little kids sometimes sit by windows and look out and then suck their thumbs and ingest the lead. It is very common in the US. The kids aren't stupid, although you are ignorant.
Seriously, either cleaning up or shutting down coal plants is one of the smartest economical things that we did in a while.
Even now, our lead on the ground is a fraction of what it was 10 years ago. As such, our children will have much lower medical costs than what we have today. The rest will be gone over the next 20 years, if not 10.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.