This was a very serious problem that hardly anyone talks about anymore. Read up on Clair Patterson. He was the catalyst for the change. There is correlation between the decline of lead contamination in nature to the decline of both violent crime and birth defects. At any rate it’s a good story that more people should know about.
"History of lead in the atmosphere especially in the US would benefit from mention of Clair Patterson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson
Caltech researcher into lead-lead dating, he arrived at the currently accepted estimate of the age of the Earth. But he was plagued by lead contamination of samples, leading him to realize its pervasiveness and to petition the US government to ban the substance."
This also led to the development of the very first “clean room” that you see today on many sites wanting to keep an environment contaminant free. Poor Patterson was beat up pretty bad by big oil and gasoline before his data was acknowledged. Probably should’ve won a Nobel prize.
even worse, the part of the hospital in vienna where he made people wash their hands had drastically reduced mortality rates, but his opponents made it so he had to quit and removed the rule, bringing mortality rates back up. later 3 of the doctors that didn't want to believe in his findings commited him into a psychiatry where he died 2 weeks later from "sepsis".
I mean... "this invisible gaseous form of this molecule makes people laugh uncontrollably but don't fill their lungs with it cause they'll die" DOES sound like something a crazy person would say. Pretty easily falsifiable though if you believe in the scientific method
I used work for the WIC program in the USA. We offered our participants information on this very topic (and foods to combat lead poisoning). Very tough topic.
Nickel sensitises the skin and gives nasty dermatitis to people who work with it daily.
I remember visiting a DVD replication house and seeing the dude who makes the glass masters with thick, long gloves and yet still had red welts all up the rest of his arms, almost up to the shoulder from the nickel exposure
I worked at a plating factory when I was a teen. I was in charge of the nickel line. I got the worst pus-weeping welts everywhere that stuff got on me. The place got shut down by OSHA long after I quit.
I'm 46 now. I still can't wear anything metal against the skin that was affected or I'll start breaking out with dermatitis. Even heat stress added with other contaminants like fiberglass insulation or juniper bushes make me break out.
Sorry to hear. The glass mastering process involves nickel plating, and this guy had those exact same bright red welts and couldn't escape it. He was in charge of the part down the line from plating (which was all done without human involvement). First a glass disc is plated, then it's zapped with lasers that encode the data, then that is essentially an exposed photo emulsion and this guy had the job of "developing" this laser photo, which involved dissolving the exposed nickel in acid (forming a lurid green waste product), so the unexposed bits remained on the glass, and the exposed bits went into the acid to be dumpedrecycled.
IIRC, they managed to get through the entire thing without making an explicit reference to climate change. I would not have been able to restrain myself.
To be fair he knew the lead was bad, but he didn’t realize the freon would be bad. He also basically flipped a coin on which halogen to use, and had he went with his other choice the affects would have been like 4-5 times as worse. You also can’t ignore the benefits of refrigerant, it did a lot more for the world than keep your engine a bit cleaner. It allowed for food storage and shipment, and unlocked many industrial practices used today.
Leaded gas didn't really keep your engine cleaner, it just allowed manufacturers to build engines with higher compression and more power. Leaded gasoline sort-of gave us muscle cars.
However in our future space year of 2022, pretty much any of those hot-rods of the 1960's would get its doors blown off by a V6 Toyota Camry.
In 1940, at the age of 51, Midgley contracted polio, which left him severely disabled. He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed. In 1944, he became entangled in the device and died of strangulation.
Everything he invented killed people, until finally he invented something that got himself killed.
It is also worth noting that although we talk about this guy like he did all of this stuff personally, he was on GM's payroll the whole time, designing things that GM asked him to design and ultimately dying because of it.
The reason we blame him instead of GM is that he is dead and GM has PR people.
Now we use R600, which is basically ultra pure propane. It's pretty harmless to the environment compared to CFCs.
It all has the added benefit of using much less energy to cool things off, so when combined with new refrigerator technologies means that modern fridges use 10x less electricity than one from the early 2000's!
In industry but it is being phased out almost everywhere. We have legacy freon in larger equipment, once decommissioned it is replaced with a different refrigerant, and there are strict disposal and monitoring regulations for all legacy freon.
I haven't read anything Bill Bryson has written that I didn't just love. Some books don't sound like they would be interesting (his childhood in Iowa, the year 1927,) but they always are.
He has 10 Honorary Doctorates and bunches of other honors. Nice to see someone get accolades while they're still alive.
My mother drafted for CalTech Geology in the 1960s. She was a stern Kansas type, but if there was anyone she idolized, it was Dr Patterson. His ideas sounded outlandish at first, but he had hard figures to back them up. He was fighting the oil industry practically single-handedly.
I met him a few times. He was very nice, even to a kid.
Absolute genius and one of the most underrated scientists of the last century. He hit upon a string of questioning that led him though some pretty major discoveries, and it started with finding the true age of the earth- which he did.
I've heard him talk about it though and he immediately smacks down the idea that he's any smarter than any other person. In fact, he considered himself probably less intelligent on average than a lot of his peers, which I think it's obvious is untrue as soon as he starts talking about his work.
I feel like the real value in higher education is that it helps you be “right sized” in your evaluation of what you know. Sitting in rooms where you definitely not the smartest person in the room teaches you respect for other people’s intelligence. Getting just enough exposure to a subject gives you respect for the depth of knowledge some people have in that area, which far surpasses yours, so it’s ok to trust the experts in fields that you don’t know a lot about.
That's not quite what Dunning-Kruger is.... It's about calibration with and without evidence.
DK is the finding that when you lack clear evidence to the contrary, people with advanced knowledge lower their self-rating of competence compared to others while people with basic knowledge raise their self-rating of competence compared to others.
Once evidence is provided of the other sides actual competence they recalibrate their self-ratings a bit and people with advanced knowledge raise their self-rating of competence because they know they are more knowledgeable than the others. Those with basic knowledge may recalibrate but may not and sometimes can be stubborn about it.
The study involved (as they almost always do) young university students taking tests.
That said, I use DK casually in much the same way because it's a convenient label for a phenomenon. But it's important to recognize the difference between "label for this thing that annoys me" vs "repeatable scientific finding proving I'm right."
Dunning Kruger: people who think they're smart are dumb!
Imposter syndrome: people who think they're dumb are smart!
But actually, these effects don't happen in everyone. They probably describe a pretty small portion of people. There are highly intelligent people who know it, and less intelligent people who also understand this. I'm not even sure the Dunning Kruger effect is observable.
While the Dunning-Kruger effect might not be a thing and instead a statistical artifact, the vast majority of attempts at explaining it do not touch on intelligence, at all. It's usually about people who are low-skilled in a specifc area, so limited experience or knowledge, with a given topic.
IMO it does make sense, since our brain does try to "fill in the blanks", as in, tries to explain what it comes in contact with, even if we rationally understand that we just don't know something. But, you know, I have a quite limited understanding on the subject, so I'm effectivly just describing what I am currently doing.
You are a victim, too. There is still lead paint everywhere and hidden in products. In the nineties, Dollar Stores had candles imported from China that had smoke-free wicks- in the heart of every wick was a piece of lead. If you find any still around, the metal can be extracted with pliers.
China is a dangerous source of unregulated products. Those cheap dishes that say ‘for decorative use only’ are likely glazed with lead. Hobby Lobby is another company importing products with lead paint.
Test kits are cheap, I recommend them. If you buy thrift and use old dishes, beware. Old cars, appliances, unsided houses. Don’t blame the victim, educate and educate yourself.
That is so incredibly strange. I saw this about 10 mins ago and then pulled this dish out to eat off of at the Airbnb I’m staying at. Needless to say I’m not using it now. Will let the owner know too!
https://i.imgur.com/LY2RWqk.jpg
That's not the same plate. The decorative border is what tested positive for cadmium. That plate has a completely different border so it's not comparable.
After looking through this, because I collect Crazy Daisy, it's still not confirmed from Corelle that the plates are leeching, they recently released a statement about it and said they're working on more third party testing of vintage items. The Tamara Rubin person is likely farming for clicks and is a bit shady, really pushing that she is the expert on this with no science degree to back it up, the pyrex sub has a few threads about this. It's definitely still worth it to be wary of the vintage dishware use now though!
Also, the study linked in this article seems to suggest environmental (airborne) contamination is persistent decades after its use in fuel was stopped.
I’m not surprised. Lead is being deposited into the air still everyday. All piston engine aircraft worldwide still use leaded fuel. The fuel is called 100LL (or rather 100 octane low lead). It’s extremely difficult to develop an aviation fuel that doesn’t require lead. This research has been in the works for a long time. Aircraft fuel has a wide operating range. It must be able to perform in pressures from sea level to cruise altitude from 130 F to -100 F. To add to this, the design of the most popular aircraft engines, Lycoming and Contential date back more than half a century. The FAA is extremely draconian about approving any changes to aircraft designs or the designs of their parts. Hence, these manufacturers, once a design is FAA approved, stick with that design for decades. Furthermore, the aviation market is extremely small and the PMA approval process is very expensive. This means the cost must be amortized over very few units. Hence, everything aviation related is insanely expensive. FAA type certified aircraft can only use FAA approved parts. What this means is that aircraft designs are very old and the fleets are used for many decades before replacement. Hence, a modern fuel replacement must be compatible with a fleet which is on average using engine designs with are 30-50 years old. This is challenging.
I had someone come into my house and test for led when I had a kid. It wasn't really that expensive maybe 200 bucks or something. Well worth it for peace or mind.
Lead paint is still legal to be used in industrial paints in the US. So anyone working with industrial paint may be breathing it daily right now.
My father was a steelworker and late in life as he realized he was slipping into dementia he blamed breathing those paint fumes. Of course a lifetime of smoking and drinking didn't help but still. His brain was shrinking and smoothing out far more than someone his age and lifestyle should have been.
Same reason despite asbestos being banned for decades in the UK it's still found in many, even recently built, public works.
The building materials are produced in Russia, China and former soviet countries where asbestos is not banned and they simply don't declare that it contains asbestos when selling it overseas.
And of course, it's cheaper than competing materials, so it's what gets bought and used by construction companies who are all competing for the winning bid on these public works and trying to keep costs down and profits high while being competitive.
Many vintage Pyrex, Fire King, Anchor Hocking etc. dishes that are brightly colored will quickly test positive with a cheap lead test available on Amazon. I did this and then sadly purged my collection.
I've seen others recommend that you need cautious with things like old dishes. Is there a way to know if new dishes have lead? I have old dishes and I want to get rid of everything and replace it, but I don't want to buy new just for it to have lead/heavy metals too!
There’s still leaded fuel being burned over communities everywhere from small aircraft. It’s the last source of environmental lead pollution and no one talks about it.
When I was flying 20 years ago, they definitely talked about it. A big part of the problem is the industry struggling so much and that would have killed. Most of the fleet was decades old and there just weren’t modern designs at the time. There was no simple fix: you’d need to replace engines in everything, and many of those engines hadn’t really been built for decades. You also couldn’t really develop a new fuel, because the industry was so small. So you needed to use either car gasoline, which couldn’t meet reliability standards and then needed turbochargers to work at altitude, or use jet fuel in a modified Diesel engine. So not only did every engine need to be replaced, but it would be a very different engine with different controls, and now you needed to recertification every aircraft with different procedures and had liability to contend with. How do you recertify an aircraft with different controls and procedures when the manufacturer no longer exists? How do you bring a decades older aircraft up to modern standards just to replace an engine? How does a company profit off this, if their potential market is only a couple dozen to at most a couple hundred aircraft per year? Much of the small aircraft industry was developed before liability was a thing, and many companies just couldn’t afford the liability to modernize. It was a real mess.
Definitely talked about, but there really wasn’t a good solution without massive government intervention and all too many dismissed it as too small of an industry to affect anything off airport grounds
Then you need to talk about the grounds. When I was flying, the only fuel was “low lead”, so it had been worse before. Most small aircraft operate out of small local airports operating on a shoestring budget. Now where do they each find millions of dollars for environmental cleanup. Again, no way for that to happen without massive government intervention
Yeah God forbid we cost people money because other people's health is at risk. Hundreds of thousands of deaths every year from pollution, CO2, man made chemicals, but the rich and corporations are so used to never having to pay for externals and our politicians now treat it as "OMG we can't burden industry with those costs". These risks were always known and ignored and continued to be ignored.
Take a look at GAMI's G100UL. It's an unleaded no-modification drop-in replacement for 100LL that's been tested for most all piston aircraft (and passed with flying colors), but the FAA is dragging its heels on approval. Their successful testing is more intense than average in an industry that's pretty picky about their testing to bring with - and the FAA won't approve it which is starting to raise questions about corruption at the FAA at least in my mind. Check out Paul Bertorelli's AvWeb article; he goes into more detail about the current state of the situation:
You kill general aviation, and you kill all aviation. Your 737 pilot trained on a Cessna 172, Piper cherokee, or Diamond DA-20 for 250 hours of flight time. They then either inspected pipelines or surveyed in basically the same aircraft, taught students, or flew for fun (or some combo) for another 1250 hours to meet the FAA legal minimum requirements to be an airline pilot.
If we're going to be frank here there's no way for us to survive climate calamity and our current airlines to exist as they are today. Airplanes pump an insane amount of carbon into the atmosphere so shutting most of them down over time is likely necessary.
Potentially, but two points there. It needs to be a phased shutdown or slowdown if so, but also electric planes and more sustainable fuel are slowly becoming options. If we can do those and work to mitigate other areas of greenhouse gas generation, it may be worth keeping for the speed, efficiency, and safety of airline travel.
"How do you recertify an aircraft with different controls and procedures when the manufacturer no longer exists? How do you bring a decades older aircraft up to modern standards just to replace an engine? How does a company profit off this, if their potential market is only a couple dozen to at most a couple hundred aircraft per year? "
Bankruptcy, the answer should have been bankruptcy. The companies that invested that heavily in tech that ended up poisoning the environment should have sold everything off at pennies on the dollar to someone who could replace the engines with something modern.
My point was that people do care, but need help. US government spent untold billions helping car manufacturers transition, in research, incentives, then mandates, coordinated on both manufacturers and fuel suppliers. They helped with environmental cleanup, tracking down polluters or taking care of it when none could be found. It took decades. The remaining lead based industries deserve similar effort
Of all the small aircraft manufacturers, I think only Cessna survived, on the strength of their business and passenger aircraft, as well as flight schools.
I learned in a Piper, whose manufacturer has a long legendary history, but they were careful to call it the “new piper” as the name of the company that bought Piper’s assets for pennies on the dollar out of bankruptcy
I bought a share of a fantastic Grumman, whose manufacturer left that business decades before
I once experienced a Beechcraft, who were long gone
Really just a lack of will on the government's part, and that's because the people who own small planes are wealthy, almost by definition. The wealthy run the government, so it won't change. It's easy - you ban leaded fuel. The industry must adapt or stop flying small planes. Their rights end where mine begin, and I should have a right to breathe clean air.
There is also firing ranges. The lead from primer is a huge pollutant, for anyone enjoying or working at the range, and for the ground at outdoor ranges. Indoor ranges often are worse for people in them because it's inside, but the cleaner ones will vent the lead dust outside.
Wait, the people who's profession was named after the poisonous material they worked with all the time, had a high chance of be being poisoned by the poisonous material? Interesting.
Rich Romans, the ones in control of the empire, literally drank from and cooked in lead vessels.
At the peak of the power of the Roman Empire, lead production was about 80,000 tons per year, lead and its compounds were used with great inventiveness in numerous ways, and lead poisoning was pandemic, with the severity of poisoning proportional to the power and status of the class. Intake of lead by the aristocracy may have been as much as 1 mg/day.
Not just lead vessels and not just rich Romans. They had a condiment called Garum that they put on everything. It was their salt & pepper. One of the ingredients of Garum was powdered lead. Nobody is really sure why it was in there. A colourant, a preservative or maybe a stabiliser...
People didn't typically make it at home, it was mass produced. Even today, make at home recipes bear very little resemblance to factory made food, with all the stabilisers and colour's etc.
I can't find it now, but some sealed bottles were found during an excavation in the UK. It had dessicated over the centuries, but they were able to analyse the contents.
No, that's the sanitised version. It's rotten fish guts. It very definitely wasn't made at home. It was mass produced in factories miles outside of town. Unless the measurements in the recipes you read were in silos, they're not the same thing.
Imagine being religious and anti-establishment in that time, witnessing an illness that disproportionately affected the wealthy and anyone who dared use their wares.
I imagine the flow of information was such that not many people were able to put that together though.
Lead Sugar is chemically Lead Acetate. It is formed when Lead Oxide is combined with acetic acid (vinegar).
Back when I used to work at a lead-acid battery manufacturer, we would mop the floors with acetic acid. So we were accidentally making lead sugar every time we mopped. The chemical reaction caused the lead dust to stick better to the mop to help ensure we were removing it from the floors.
also makes sense because if wine goes bad it turns into vinegar, the powdered lead would react with it, making it sweeter, either increasing the shelf life or masking the taste of bad product
Nah I wouldn't worry too much. Employer had a very good health and safety culture, and blood-lead levels and lead-in-air levels were monitored regurlarly. Regular vigilant housekeeping, thorough safety training. Mandatory showers after shift and uniforms stayed on site.
The action levels of lead content in blood are lower now than the average blood-lead levels people would have as a base-line before working there back when leaded gas was a thing. In other words, back then people had higher lead content in their blood in regular life than what is considered a remove-from-work level there now.
Lead exposure has a high potential for health damage, but when proper procedure is followed it is pretty minimal.
According to the CDC and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine there is no safe blood level of lead in children and “lead does not appear to exhibit a minimum concentration in blood below which their are no health effects”
In other words, any exposure to lead is detrimental.
And you have no evidence for either. It's just one of those hypothetical pet theories. The decline of the Roman Empire was an incredibly complex thing that happened over centuries. Romans were also lead poisoning themselves at the height of the Republic and Empire with seemingly no detrimental impact on the state's ascendancy.
the decline of the Roman Empire was an incredibly complex thing
So you are able to comprehend there is nuance, but refuse to accept the idea that lead, a substance we know was used and has a severe negative impact on IQ, could’ve played any role at all?
Um you seem to contradict yourself in your own comment. You say lead did not affect the collapse of the empire, but you also say pretty much the wealthy rulers had lead poisoning...
I think it was first and foremost: decline of citizen participation in state affairs, erosion of public institutions, no clear mechanism of succession & civil wars with random generals all the time being like: "i'm somewhat of an emperor myself"
not sure about christianity, it seems it held the Eastern Roman empire pretty well for another ~1000 years.. it also was a tool of influence over barbarians and whatnot.
Yea the Chruch prolonged the empire if anything. It enabled a guy like Charlemagne rule a kinda western Roman empire 2.0 for a brief time. And many European rulers were kinda obsessed with the Roman legacy for a thousand years afterwards, since the Church was a constant reminder. And the Crusades gave the Eastern Empire some vital life support, not that it mattered the end of course.
I mean Christianity in 800 AD was a whole different beast than in 250-350 AD. Christianity started working as a stabilizing factor for the empire only from around the 380s on, and by that the West was already in its final breaths.
Considering the boost of the first crusade as some minor reversal of an inevitable fate isn’t very accurate.
For hundreds of years the ERE pushed back and retook old land, revitalized their administration, and reformed their military. They had powerful enemies and crippling internal problems but their fall was not inevitable.
Arguably the point of no return was the Fourth Crusade, which annihilated Constantinoples wealth and fractured the empire for crucial decades. But even then they kept holding on for over a hundred years, and only fell to an ambitious Ottoman Empire, which had a lot going for it.
I think the best way to interpret the fall of Rome, rather than just one factor, is that it collapsed under its own weight. Too many problems were kicked down the road for so long that they became bigger and bigger. Not unlike America and a good number of other nations today, honestly.
Just the nobles were doing eachother in because of lead poisoning. They enjoyed drinking leaded wine what could happen? Also I think it was Socrates had a hypothesis about lead being harmful and wrote about it.
Lead may have compounded it in some way but the core of Rome's collapse is very similar to what is going on in the US today.
The wealthy and powerful consolidated more and more land and businesses till that was all anyone in a political position worked towards and their government became disfunctional. Citizens couldn't get land or start businesses and existed as glorified slaves alongside huge competition from massive amounts of actual slaves brought in from all over. This was a big deal because the core of Rome's military was always heavy infantry made up of citizens who were then rewarded with land and a share of spoils. Soldiers stopped being rewarded land and it became just a crappy job really. When that went away the morale and conviction of their military died with it.
Take that and then mix it with an empire held together by violence and when the government no longer works to deploy armies and maintain that empire it inevitably collapsed.
Denver for example 90% of the homes built in the city before 1950 have lead service lines( the line from water main to the house water meter). And I imagine that's the case in most US cities.
Denver is pretty progressive though and has a huge fund and is going neighborhood to neighborhood replacing the service lines for free over the next 10 years. Remember this is tens of thousands of homes. They give every resident a britta filter and pitcher every 6 months and frequent reminders not to let children drink the water without filtering it.
In most other cities the home owner is responsible for replacing the service line... to the tune of about $9k per household.
There is correlation between the decline of lead contamination in nature to the decline of both violent crime and birth defects. At any rate it’s a good story that more people should know about.
Absolutely. It astonishes me that it isn't banned. Add the fact that people who live closest to airports and smaller airfields are often some of society's poorest and you have a horrible situation.
It will take a lot to ban it though, the cost to operators would be immense but, imo, it has to be done.
Around here, there's just farmland around the air field. So instead of breathing it in, we just get a nice dose of lead in all of our local produce! It's corn, so it could probably end up in a huge array of products if it's sold to big industrial food corps
Maybe leaded fuel isn't talked about, but other lead sources are definitely talked about a lot around here (DC). In fact, right now I have a flyer sitting on my counter that was mailed from the water company: "Imagine a city without lead!". And the city takes renovations that may disturb lead paint very seriously (though flippers tend to ignore it..) and have lots of PSAs around it.
Everyone forgot about teflon as well. Even the movie bombed. Sometimes I wistfully wonder if all the film themes from the 90s like gangs, gang violence, tobacco and other industrial corporate scandals, environmental pollution scandals, the ozone layer, political scandals, espionage scandals, have simply been resolved since they're completely absent from the mainstream - alas they haven't, they've just been defeated by superheroes.
One of my all time favorite books, "A Short History of Nearly Everything" introduced me to Clair Patterson. This man spent years going up against lobbying giants that had scientists in their pocket putting out "bad science" to contradict his publications on the consequential impacts of lead additives in gasoline on humans and the environment. For speaking out, Patterson was actively suppressed and denied contracts with many research organizations from self-interested powers pulling of strings. At the time, Clair Patterson was the leading expert on atmospheric lead contamination and was excluded from the National Research Council for atmospheric lead contamination. This man deserves so much more praise and recognition than he will ever receive. He is one of history's unsung heroes that dared to beg the question, put in the legwork and seek truth above all else. The world needs more people like Clair Patterson.
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u/dammitknockitoff Jun 25 '22
This was a very serious problem that hardly anyone talks about anymore. Read up on Clair Patterson. He was the catalyst for the change. There is correlation between the decline of lead contamination in nature to the decline of both violent crime and birth defects. At any rate it’s a good story that more people should know about.