A new study indicates that as much as half of US adults have suffered neurological damage from lead exposure related to tetraethyl lead in gasoline.
The actual IQ impact is fairly small, under 6 points, but lead poisoning is also associated reduced impulse control and violence.
This might explain a lot about what is wrong in our society.
More than half of people in the US may have a slightly lower IQ as a result of inhaling exhaust gases from vehicles run on leaded petrol when they were children. The harm is thought to be most pronounced among people born in the 1960s and 1970s, when use of this fuel was at its peak.
Similar effects have probably occurred in other high-income countries, says Aaron Reuben at Duke University in North Carolina. “Patterns of lead use in gasoline throughout the last century were very similar across developed countries.”
Lead began being added to petrol in the 1920s to make car engines run more smoothly. If the substance enters the brain, it can disrupt nerve signalling and, at higher levels, kill brain cells. Young children are particularly susceptible due to the metal disrupting brain development.
Using data from a national survey, Reuben and his colleagues analysed the circulating lead levels of over 11,600 children aged 1 to 5 years from blood samples drawn between 1976 and 2016. They also estimated blood lead levels for the period from 1940 to 1975 based on leaded petrol use during that time. This data was then linked to an established formula of how lead exposure influences IQ.
Their results suggest half the current US population had elevated lead levels in their blood as children. Across the country, they estimate that lead exposure may have caused an average IQ drop of 2.6 points. People born in the mid-to-late 1960s may have lost an average of 5.9 points.
If this is indeed the case, many in our society are suffering from serious neurological illnesses, which would explain a lot.
8 comments :
No argument here.
I vividly recall my oldest brother smelting lead on top of the incinerator. Just stood in the neurotoxic plume, waiting for it to get hot enuf to pour his lead fishing weights.
So it was more than just gasoline. That crap was everywhere. Even in the suburban homes of former UC Berkeley chemistry majors.
He later stole cars, got in trouble for statutory rape/abduction, and joined a cryptonazi cult. So he turned out swell.
Not to jump on the implied post hoc logic, but with the exception of Germany, the leaded gas phase out in the European Union occurred later than in the United States. (https://www.worstpolluted.org/projects_reports/display/66)
Therefore, one would expect to see Europe suffering more.
I think that the US polity was sicker to begin with Stephen.
It's why the right wing in Europe, for example, did not demagogue the death penalty as much as the right wing in the US.
Back in the 1920s? When lead started to be used?
Weimar Republic Germany had other things on their mind in the 1920's, like ruinous inflation imposed by the Treaty of Versailles.
Paying reparations, losing territory, no heavy industry allowed, no jobs, it was a brutal policy that virtually guaranteed a savage backlash.
They got around to demagogueing the death penalty just a few years later, as the lead takes time to poison and impair an entire population with hatred and violence.
Stephen, lead, specifically whit lead, has shown an association with violence, as noted by the explosion of violent crime with the opening of the national road through the upper Midwest in the late 1800s. I wrote about this about 7 years ago.
Basically, once the road opened up commerce, there was an explosion in the use of white lead based paint, and about 20 years later, an explosion in rural violence.
Red, I was talking about post WWII abandonment of the death penalty.
What are the stats about murder in Europe? They also switched over to lead paint.
You have a touch faith in confirmatory articles.
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