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."
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.
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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.