From that article: "Unfortunately, the number of murders is relatively small compared to the universe of violent crime, which makes it statistically challenging to analyze."
Blaming lead for the increase in crime certainly has an appeal. Any claim like that is going to be controversial - pinning causes and effect this closely is a bit like large-scale anecdotal evidence - you're never going to repeat the multitude of causes and effects to went into the twenty years from 1980 to 2000.
A different approach I find compelling involves those who look at different time scales. Especially, violent crime has been declining since colonial times in the US and around the globe - with specific exceptions. While the overall downward trend needs explanation, any moment where crime is declining is normal and the moments of upturn seem to be what needs explanation. And the explanation here is often the aftermath of war, soldiers who've learned to kill coming home.
Of course this isn't to claim lead pollution is in any way acceptable but whether it lead to violent crime is a fuzzy question.
Lead level in blood is connected to crime in in state level inside the US and other countries. Different states and different countries had differentl levels of exposure and they stopped using leaded gas at different times.
There is also direct evidence of neurotoxicity of lead.
Crucially here there are even countries that phased out lead at different times in different areas and saw geographically corresponding changes in crime rates. The evidence for lead:crime is phenomenal.
Yes, but that [changes in lead usage being correlated with socio-economic factors] would be more amazing than lead exposure explanation.
Not really, infrastructure changes of various sorts are often correlated with socio-economic factors. There's a reason Flint, MI's water system was wantonly destroyed and not that of a wealth Connecticut Suburb.
it's likely a society that has reached the point where it has the economic means & political will to replace lead pipes is also improving schools / etc at that point
Replacing lead supply lines with galvanized pipe (or PEX/(C)PVC/Copper) doesn't really improve water service except for the fact that it doesn't taint the water with lead.
Years ago I had lead pipes replaced in the building where I lived. Zero difference... except for the fact that I'd actually drink tap water.
The tap water is drinkable, you just wouldn't want it to be your primary source of drinking water.
Anyway, growing up middle class in the 80s and 90s, we had a filtered water spout on our sink. If you weren't poor, they were fairly common. Once lead was removed from the supply lines, we still continued to use them since it also stripped out chlorine etc.
My point is, work-arounds for leaded drinking water weren't impactful enough to cause crime themselves.
If you want to attribute a drastic decline in violent crime to drinking glasses filling slightly faster you're going to need some extraordinary evidence.
> My point is, work-arounds for leaded drinking water weren't impactful enough to cause crime themselves.
Ahh, I see your point. Places with high amounts of lead also have high numbers of old buildings predating lead paint laws, industrial runoff and/or dumping, and many other sources--see Fruitvale.
I’m assuming you’re employed? Not everyone will have a brita filter or the inclination to pay out their ass for bottled water.
EDIT: I don't mean to be a dick or even argue, I'm just pointing out that these problems do affect people, just maybe not most people through an effective combination of factors that reduces risk (where you live, whether you can afford a filter, etc). I certainly grew up on tap water and I am mildly disturbed people are ok with it causing massive mental health issues.
EDIT 2: Finally, I don't filter water I cook with; I imagine lead would still be a problem there. I probably should filter that water too in Oakland....
I always wonder if these "toxins in the tap water are tolerable" people ever eat at restaurants. Do they know where the water used to prepare food and make coffee and tea comes from?
>And the explanation here is often the aftermath of war, soldiers who've learned to kill coming home.
I don't think the stats bear that out. Veterans may suffer PTSD and other ailments, but I don't think they contribute disproportionally to US crime statistics.
Brazil hasn't been at war recently, but they have high crime rate.
I wonder if drug trafficking and the global drug war counts? I mean it's in some ways even more violent, but I guess then I'm mixing up cause and effect... interesting to think about.
They do commit more crimes then average population. And some of that is due to untreated PTSD and due to too little help in adjusting to civilian life.
How many of those are theft or violence with victims, and how many of those are more like drug/alcohol infractions, or "disorderly conduct" caused by untreated mental health problems?
Afaik, there is more violence too. Yes, often caused by untreated mental health problems. Also more suicides. Combat situation tends to make mental health problems bigger in pretty much any aspect. It is not exactly easy or healthy situation to be in.
Veterans also face negative stereotypes which does not help anything either. Pro veteran groups tend to talk about all those openly, as they want to get more help to veterans before it all happens.
I have personally seen prospects designed to combat negative stereotypes of veterans in American government office (employment office - don't recall exact name). The primary goal seemed to be to make employers more likely to hire them.
I've read interesting comparisons between veteran experiences after WWII and the Vietnam War. In the case of the former, the nation was relatively united, and the draft was quite universal. The cohort effect was very strong, and integration back into society was relatively automatic.
Also consider that the US forces did not get the worst of the war in global terms. Plus, the relationship between the occupying forces and civilians was totally different for WWII / Vietnam.
For all of those who are so amazed at the current state of technology in the world, it's articles like these that help bring us back to Earth.
It was less than 100 years ago that we thought it was a good idea to (1) put lead in paint, (2) put asbestos in building materials, (3) put x-ray machines in shoe stores so people could casually look at their feet (learned this from a relative).
We are only a few generations away from some literal dark age shit.
And 1 guy, Thomas Midgeley Jr., played a major role in both the use of leaded gasoline and in the development of some of the first chlorofluorocarbons which were later found to be eating the ozone layer.
Late in life he was disabled by polio. After inventing a system of ropes and pulleys to assist his aides in lifting him from his bed, he became entangled in it and died of strangulation.
He's almost a real-world version of Pratchett's Discworld inventor Bloody Stupid Johnson.
I live in a wealthy Northern European country and asbestos wasn't made completely illegal until the early 90s... Never underestimate the power of lobbying. Cleaning it all up is costing society many billions.
lesson: reject claims which dispute safety with claims of necessity for profitability. reject claims which dispute science with lobbying. reject the idea that profitmaking is a right; profitmaking is a privilege which is permitted after preconditions of safety, social usefulness, and general propriety are satisfied.
The dangers were known at the time. The League of Nations had treaty in the 1920s to ban lead paint, knowledge of the dangers of course proceeded it by a lot. The same with leaded gas. The millions of lives affected and $trillions in damages were completely avoidable except for greed.
Well, the fun thing is to look at what we do know and wonder what horrible stuff people will see that should have been more obvious to us in the present day.
I think coal burning power plants are the next big one. There's been some studies that have come out lately which link coal plants to tons of modern ailments.
Modern Diesel engines don’t smoke. And black Diesel is mostly just muck and not pollution in the way you think it is, clear diesel exhaust has the NOX in it.
Sorry, but it seems you don’t actually know anything about diesels.
If we have data, let's go with the data. If all we have is opinions, let's go with mine.
Diesel exhaust is a Group 1 carcinogen, which causes lung cancer and has a positive association with bladder cancer.[2][3][4][5][6] It contains several substances that are also listed individually as human carcinogens by the IARC.
Not only this, but also having the almost identified horrible stuff right now but still using it and discussing its ups and downs because of the convenience and lower price.
In the vein of: i know 98.5% of scientists agree X will harm me, my children, my loved ones and neighbors. The other 1.5% have questionable sponsors, but X is not yet illegal and costs half the price of X-alternative ... so i'm using it one last time. Anyway, if it was really that bad, the gov't would have banned it by now anyway, so ... and then i take another free plastic bag.
AFAIK the issue in flint was that the increased acidity from the new water source destroyed the protective coating in the lead pipes. Lead pipes should be safe under normal conditions.
I think part of the problem is lead containing deposits in pipes that accumulated over decades. And then they switched water sources and it started leaching out. The guys that did that knew that would happen and typical of conservatives didn't care.
I’d say the people who handled the switchover, state engineers, were likely liberals, not that it matters. It’s not as if treating the water incorrectly was a cost saving measure, they just screwed up.
The managers are the ones who handle water treatment? Switching from detroit water to flint river water was perfectly safe, if phosphate levels and/or ph was matched (or other approaches to manage the protective layer of minerals inside lead service lines).
Detroit ends it's contract with flint, flint moves to water from the flint river, change in water chemistry has disastrous effects (not just lead).
Are you saying instead of engineers screwing up the water treatment (failing to match new water to old) the city managers told them to let the water chemistry change? Do you have any evidence of that?
Look at American the sharp spike in American obesity and mental illness. People have tried to explain it by convenient things like the internet or lethargic lives, yet our deterioration is relatively unique while internet access and lethargy is not. Something we are doing or consuming is screwing us up mightily, and generations of the future will look back with bewilderment that we didn't know we shouldn't [...] .
Lead had a huge lobby during its heyday. The inventor of leaded fuel [1] would have exhibitions where he would sit and huff leaded fuel, pour it on his hands, and so on. And there was extensive corporate backed science arguing that it was all perfectly safe. Incidentally he's also the guy who invented CFCs, which also ended up banned. Interesting character!
This Wikipedia article almost reads as an onion spoof. He was treated for lead poisoning at least twice. He contracted polio and invented a series of ropes and pullies to assist him and his family to get him out of bed which ended up strangling him to death. It seems that GM(who he worked for)is largely responsible for inventing what are arguably the worst compounds for the planet other than the nuclear bomb. Absolutely astonishing read.
as another HN commentator said: if there is a powerful lobbying group pushing for one thing and third party scientists are saying something else, "the jury" will stay "out" for decades even if the evidence is clear.
lesson: interpreting corporate funded science inversely is sometimes a faster route to the truth than waiting for them to come around.
That's why it's extremely important to have unbiased scientific research and try to work on methods that would allow us to discover long-term effects of different factors on living organisms in a shorter time.
A good example is electromagnetic radiation. We know quite well the effects of specific wavelengths at defined intensity on living organisms. Some wavelengths are lethal at certain doses, some seem to have no visible effect. Given how ubiquitous radio communication is these days, one would think it's in our best interests to conduct large-scale studies on long-term effects of the wavelengths most commonly used on living cells. It would be tragic to discover the effects are there but because the related EMR is so widespread it's hard to correlate these factors in the population.
eh, i jumped down the EMR rabbit hole a few years ago at the behest of a friend trying to put together a research proposal.
the in vitro data we have is uninspiring. you can prompt cells to lose viability if you expose them to EMR (radio from what i remember) in very contrived and artificial conditions with exposure far beyond what humans would absorb.
yeah, it probably would be better for you to not have all these waves bouncing around/through us. but i think it could be much worse.
We still haven't found good replacements for those materials (asbestos in particular) at similar price points.
While I agree that we shouldn't be wrapping every hot water pipe in asbestos and painting kids bikes with led paint there's got to be a more flexible middle ground between outright ban and allowing widespread use. Leaded brass plumbing fittings are everywhere (and labeled to indicate they should not be used for potable water) and nobody complains.
I wish asbestos in particular were still available for situations where you need insulation that's really hard to catch on fire, there's really no replacement for it that I'm aware of.
Another source of lead pollution that I wasn't aware about until buying a house on former orchard land is that lead arsenate was used as an insecticide against the coddling moth for several decades. It is a large issue in Eastern Washington State where a lot of former orchard land has become schools, housing and parks.
I’ve been trying tonfigure our if fruit and vegetables grown in lead polluted soil pick up lead or not. I haven’t been able to track down a good answer
From the research I've done it seems that most plants pick up very little. In fact it's almost a problem because you can't "leach" it out through planting. On the other hand, fruits and such aren't affected. The problem is that it's in the soil, so you have to be really careful about washing produce if it's dusty. I would be very hesitant to eat any beets, carrots, potatoes, etc... unless the soil had been amended. That usually means several feet get manually removed and dumped somewhere else and you bring in fresh topsoil. This is what WA state has had to do with a lot of the parks and public schools where they've tested and found high Pb levels.
That's what I've read as well. Generally in soils lead gets sequestered as lead sulfate and phosphate. I think unless acidic conditions exist it just stays there indefinitely.
And plants tend not to absorb it. So your tomatoes are okay.
Short answer, yes, it can remain in soil attached to root vegetables and be taken up into the tubers themselves, less so with leaf material, and further less so with fruits. It depends on the concentration of lead in the soil, the type of soil, and so on. The primary worry is soil-dust contaminated with lead, which can go airborne.
"
Do not grow leafy vegetables or root or tuber
crops (carrots, potatoes, beets, turnips) in
lead-contaminated soils. Grow them in raised
beds filled with clean soil, where the clean
soil cannot become contaminated with paint
flakes, chips, or dust.
Fruits that are marketed as vegetables, such
as tomatoes, peppers, beans, cucumbers, and
squash, may be grown in lead-contaminated
soils will not accumulate significant
concentrations of lead.
The primary risk of lead consumption from
eating a plant grown in a lead-contaminated
soil is from ingesting lead-rich soil that
adheres to the surface of the plant. Therefore,
washing and peeling greatly reduces the risk
of ingesting lead deposited on surfaces of
vegetables and fruits
"[0]
> Enriching the soil with compost also helps increase fertility. As a result, the overall size of vegetables increases, diluting the amount of lead they contain. The effects of using compost can be striking. In the study, addition of compost cut the available concentration of lead by as much as one-half.
This is a statement that's technically true, and at the same time practically wrong. If the context is that I'm going to be eating tomatoes from my garden, what's likely to happen is that if my yield doubles, my consumption doubles (unless I have a massive garden and can't eat everything I grow). So now I'm eating the same amount of lead, just in a bigger package!
It's actually quite common for people to have a high enough yield from their garden to be unable to consume it all themselves. They end up canning some of it, giving it away to friends and neighbors and even posting questions to forums asking for creative ways to dispose of the remaining surplus without just trashing it.
Store bought food isn't actually "perfect." I limit my rice consumption in part because it contains arsenic.[1]
Antibiotic resistant infections are a serious and growing threat. The CDC indicates that one in five such infections are "caused by germs from food and animals." This is from info they put out about antibiotic resistant infections and food safety. [2]
There are lots and lots of articles out there about unsafe cookware. The ones that pop to the top are mostly from disreputable sources. I've tried to find one that doesn't sound too nutty. [3]
I began avoiding aluminum cookware long before it was some kind of hot trend. I strongly favor glass bakeware and enamel cookware. It gets dismissed as nutty on forums like HN to talk about things like the dangers of teflon cookware, but if you are really seriously concerned about food safety (and metal poisoning in specific), you need to stop and think about the chemical impact on your food of the kind of cookware you use.
We actively recommend that people cook with iron pots and pans to treat anemia.[4] So it's not like we are unaware that the materials your cookware are made of can imbue your food with metals. But we typically downplay the seriousness of using things like aluminum cookware and anyone who adheres too strictly to such a guideline or too loudly advocates such a guideline is dismissed as a nutter.
I have a genetic disorder, a form of Cystic Fibrosis. I exchanged emails with a PhD biologist met through HN who kindly answered some of my questions. My belief is that my genetic disorder predisposes me to retain metals at a higher rate than normal. This guy said that given the function of the CFTR (the defective cell channel responsible for CF symptoms), that did not sound like crazy talk to him.
So I am pretty careful about exposure to metals in food and other details of food chemistry while also trying to not just make myself absolutely nuts.
My "professional opinion" -- as a former homemaker and person who never completed my BS in Environmental Resource Management :) -- is that if you have contaminated soil in your yard and you want to garden, then you should pursue a "square foot" gardening style approach and create fresh elevated beds from imported clean soils and compost for whatever small plants you desire to grow.
A desire to grow fruit trees is not conducive to that approach and most homeowners will not have the means to remove all contaminated soils on their property and replace them for purposes of planting trees. At that point, you can try to remediate the soil to some degree or give up on having food producing trees or have soil testing and make a judgement call.
There are no 100% safe foods on the planet. Over the years I've read a lot of things about what is in our food that really turned my stomach and made me lose my appetite. Then I developed some best practices to try to limit the damage, and I put my blinders on and I try to not think about those details too much while actually eating.
My understanding is that it doesn't make its way into fruit, but it probably does into the green and woody tissues of the plant. So vegetables grown in it are a concern.
This is a really ancedotal story with sample size N=1 so YMMV. I lived in a poorly maintained building constructed in the 1920s. I'm sure there was old lead paint that was just painted over. Also a couple of times per month the pipes would spew out brown water. During that time I was dealing with a lot of anger outbursts and anxiety attacks. Since I've moved (same city, same job, slightly higher rent), these things really haven't been a problem. Again it's hard to know what the exact reason is, but I do wonder if I was experiencing some version of heavy metal poisoning.
I actually used to spend a lot of time on a chelation and alternative medicine forum. Chelation is the way heavy metals are drawn from the tissues when you have metal poisoning.
You don't magically get better if you end up with heavy metal poisoning. Without treatment, it tends to remain in your tissues permanently. (However, life is chemistry and there are some foods that can promote the removal of metals, such as cilantro which is commonly found in Mexican fare.)
My guess would be the old building had mold or fungus issues. If you are otherwise in good health and don't wind up with a bona-fide fungal infection, moving out of such a situation would go a long ways towards resolving your issues.
>"The most recent evidence from epidemiological and toxicological studies suggests that low levels of exposure can, over time, damage the heart, kidneys, and brain."
From what I’ve seen and heard the answer with lead is an unequivocal no - once lead exposure has occurred, the damage is done. It’s compounding and irreversible.
Take a look at the link, it's relevant to your question. As mentioned there, your body stores lead in your bones, which leeches into your blood stream. Because there does not appear to be a minimum safe threshold of exposure, even small exposure can, over time, lead to problems as the lead is circulated through your body, as mentioned in the quote. Sorry it doesn't appear clear when taken out of context.
Yup. Plenty of houses have asbestos siding and lead paint - neither of which poses a significant danger to the average adult as long as it isn’t disturbed. (Asbestos siding is durable, fireproof, and holds paint well too!)
I wish there were more anecdotes in the article. It would be good to know that lead was what gave some known rogues their head start in life. I am sure there are many other factors but if a Charles Manson or other notorious rogue had spent their formative years living under an interstate highway then that would be good to know.
The guy who invented lead-in-petrol also invented CFCs. He also died quite horribly from some contraption he made to hoist himself out of bed.
The downside to not having lead in petrol is that the raw material for the disturbing U.S. movies of the 70's has gone away, so if 'Dirty Harry' was made today then the rogues in it would not be as plausible.
Lead paint really isn't a big deal if it wasn't chipping away. And you weren't eating it. Lead paint isn't ideal but if just existed and was maintained in an older home you had little risk.
The fact that it went away when you left the environment tends to strongly suggest that it wasn't heavy metal poisoning, which tends to have permanent effects.
It's really hard to understand that the country is not setting up a nationwide program to get rid of lead paint and fixing the water supply. The payoff would be enormous.
Enormous, but diffuse. Governments, and especially democracies, and especially especially the United States have consistently failed miserably at tackling problems with diffuse benefits bit highly visible costs, even when the costs are much lower.
The theory is too narrow here -- not only does this apply to governments, it applies to businesses. Or technical debt and sufficiently large software projects. Or individuals and lifestyle choices.
Our reward structures aren't always lined up with optimal responses to current conditions.
Good point. And people with similar mindsets/POVs tend to be at the top of such large organizations. I think there's just a certain way of being in the world that makes some people inclined to a) want to be in charge, and b) downplay these kinds of diffuse, semi-intangibly-expensive problems. We need better ways of explaining problems to them.
Lead-based paints have been banned for use in housing since 1978. Eliminating existing lead paint--as opposed to just painting over it, which is the default--would involve extremely costly and disruptive mitigation for tens of millions of homes and would probably release more lead into the environment than just leaving it in place. I suspect that it wouldn't even be practical in the case of many older houses.
Does anyone know any good studies looking at this in different countries?
For example, lots of communist countries had ridiculous levels of lead pollution. Does this show up in their crime & IQ stats, as articles like this suggest it should? They also (sometimes) took great effort to mix up the population, putting all social classes in the same building... which would help avoid one complaint here, that obviously people who could afford to do so chose not to live in the most polluted bits of American cities.
Because the spike in alcoholism after the Soviet Union collapsed might drown out lead-based signals in crime rates, you might try any of the former DDR, Czechia or Poland, especially in the "Black Triangle" around As which was heavily industralised.
I think this would be a good variable to analyze. A lot of third-world countries didn't have a large automobile infrastructure, and so they had lower lead levels, leading to smarter people with less crime.
This could be the source of "smart Asian" stereotype.
But, I don't know if atmospheric lead pollution is uniform globally or localized.
It is very localized - areas by old highways have issues with higher lead concentration in soil. Which seems intuitive but CFCs are heavier than air yet can still wind up high enough to cause ozone layer issues via air currents
The aqueducts feeding water to Ancient Rome were lined with lead, which apparently had a poisoning effect. Was the famous Roman Mob affected by this same thing?
The water was pretty hard (lots of dissolved minerals) and it formed a protective non reactive layer over the lead.
The same thing happened in Flynt, but the city cheaped out on the pH control chemicals, the protective layer was dissolved, and eventually the pipes with lead in them started leaching.
Three things I've read. Romans complained in writings about the use of lead acetate in wine.
They also used lead cook pots to reduce grape juice to Defrutum.
And the Romans used to smelt lead in Italy and banned the practice eventually. I've never seen a description of a Roman lead smelting operation but I can imagine.
On the other hand I haven't seen anyone trying look for lead poisoning in Roman era bones. Just looked found this.
Iraq stopped using leaded petrol in 2011. The lead/crime hypothesis postulates a 22 year time-lag. So if Iraq becomes a lot more peaceful in 2033 you'll know what's up.
Incidentally, the list of countries where leaded petrol is still used, or was banned most recently, is basically a list of countries where bad things happen: "Algeria, Iraq, Yemen, Myanmar, North Korea, and Afghanistan". But the causality probably goes the other way; leaded petrol is cheaper.
Lead pipes don't necessarily imply significant amounts of lead in the water; it's highly dependent on the acidity of the water (notoriously, see Flint).
It's pretty nuts some of the toxic chemicals the Romans used. I seem to recall arsenic as a major component of beauty products, and lead compounds as artificial sweeteners.
They used to use arsenic in wallpaper. If it got damp enough some types of mold would convert inorganic arsenic into volatile organic arsenic compounds and poison people.
Just remembered an ex gf worked in a museum. She said they used to dust taxidermist specimens with arsenic powder to prevent pests and decay. So a lot of display items are problematic. Toxic, irreplaceable, and you can't just throw them out either.
I saw a picture of some old Victorian era wallpaper. All the colors had completely faded except the black ink and the rich purple arsenic pigmented flowers.
I feel this is just a case of correlation != causation. I remember once someone, perhaps here, posted something that would randomly link things together based on loose trends, oftentime to ridiculous results. There are a -lot- of societal changes in those years. If lead were the sole culprit, crime would have dropped off a cliff.
You can disagree with me, downvote me, and tell me why i'm wrong, but please don't make comments like this. It's rude and against guidelines.
Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
Your comment implied that the author doesn't address this in depth in the article. Your article flippantly compares this to people finding random correlations, which is so far from the content of the article that I'd personally consider your comment rude and in bad faith.
My comment was not directed at anyone, unless maybe the author himself found it rude. I did read the article, and I still don't buy it and don't like that it's presented as fact. I did not in fact mean to make light of what research was done, only that it's easy to fall into a trap of finding correlations and 'proving' them. As I read the article, I could almost immediately come up with an equally logical, unrelated-to-lead counterpoint.
"An Updated Lead-Crime Roundup for 2018", Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, 1 Feb 2018.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...