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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.
Right but it does explain how people got by eating and drinking from leaded pewter dishes every day while slathering them selves in lead based make up; and how later people managed to be mostly okay breathing exhaust from leaded gasoline.
It explains quite nicely how a small amount of lead can cause both serious problems and at the same time mass lead exposure did not destroy society. Although there is thinking that it impacted crime rates.
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Lead may be a trigger in autoimmune disorders such as type 1 diabetes as well.
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"Right but it does explain how people got by eating and drinking from leaded pewter dishes every day while slathering them selves in lead based make up; "
They died with the Roman Empire, some scientists even say, lead is the cause of both deaths.
People at highest risk from cardiovascular disease are also at risk to exposure to lead. Lead based paint is still prevalent in some inner cities in older housing. Poor people live in this housing and die earlier than middle/upper income people. Poor people have a higher rate of cardiovascular disease. These studies are always so silly.
It's interesting to note the lead has been known to be toxic since at least the time of the ancient greeks. And yet the paint industry used it as its main component for white paint until something like WWII. They used the same tactics that have been later used by Big Tobacco and climate change deniers to delay change by spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. Particularly paying respected professionals (doctors, etc) to publish and deny toxicity.
How do we know that ? When they were finally convicted, their archives were forced to become public and proved a treasure trove of assholery (or is that assholeness ?) There are several recent books and publications about that (namely in Scientific American)
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I guess that's the end of my cavalier attitude towards lead-based solder - now that I've been soldering for 50-plus years and still use my lips as a 'third hand' to hold solder sometimes. I know it's elemental lead and therefore less readily absorbed, but still... I've had my blood tested for lead levels a few times, and never had any results that caused my doctor even mild concern. But now that I've read this... It's probably too late for me, but from now on I won't be making any more snarky comments about "politically correct solder".
Lead based solder performs much better than the alternatives, because lead is an 'aggressive' metal. I guess even the elemental form may be similarly aggressive when it comes to biochemical activity. Of course, this also renews my concerns about the mouthful of mercury I have in the form of dental fillings.
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Many believe that tetraethyl lead is responsible for the rise in violent crime in the 70s and 80s, tracking the increase in cars and gasoline consumption in the post WW2 years. Likewise the drop in violent starting around 1990 was the effect of lead-free gas.
Other than the availability of safe, legal abortions, it's about the only factor anyone's come up with that explains the prevalence of the violent crime trend across countries and legal jurisdictions with very different philosophies with respect to crime. In the US the reduction parallels an increase in gun sales, but the same trend occurs in countries where gun sales are flat or have gone down.
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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 wouldn't call it a habit of the Lancet per say... Perhaps we should call it more of a profit center.
Most medical journals have a perverse motive to increase circulation, attention by publishing studies that will bring them critical attention. In the case of the Lancet, they published a faked study about vaccines which they later retracted when it was shown to be faked years later by an investigative reporter. One questions their motives and lax editorial review processes because of things like this. But we really should realize that all of these publishers have the same perverse motives.
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Gun ownership and crime is surely a very complex topic where the interaction between the two variables makes establishing a causal relationship much harder. I've lived in rural areas where there is no police force. Rates of gun ownership were a big crime deterrent. Of course so was that fact that people were poor so there was no point of robbing them.
Urban crime rates are likely influenced more by the drug trade than overall gun ownership. The reality is that there are probably geographies where increased gun ownership results in lower crime and other geographies where it results in higher crime. Also, a property crime is less severe than a violent crime which also makes the problem harder.
In the US we don't have good data in this area because the pro-gun lobby fights any effort to study the problem. The only motivation for such a thing is a fear of what the data will show. You don't want an answer to be found if you're pretty sure you're wrong! I'm pro gun-control but I could be persuaded by data if there were honest attempts and objective studies.