[HN Gopher] Contribution of childhood lead exposure to psychopat...
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Contribution of childhood lead exposure to psychopathology in the
US
Author : ndsipa_pomu
Score : 53 points
Date : 2024-12-04 13:57 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Title taken from a Gizmodo article discussing the study as the
| study's title itself was too long for Hacker New.
|
| https://gizmodo.com/lead-exposure-drove-a-hidden-mental-heal...
| wnevets wrote:
| If you ask me the the lead poisoning stare is real.
| xtracto wrote:
| "Lead poisoning stare" takes quite morbid meaning for someone
| from Mexico like myself haha. After all "plata o plomo".
| jeffbee wrote:
| The guy who invented leaded gas is the original -10x engineer.
| Poisoned an entire nation, destroyed the ozone layer, and killed
| himself with a homemade gizmo. Unprecedented performance.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Moved fast and broke himself.
| nayuki wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr. , and a video
| by Veritasium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA (25
| min)
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| What homemade gizmo killed him? A quick search online said that
| he died from a stroke.
| alaithea wrote:
| It's in the Wikipedia article. It was a device he invented to
| help himself get out of bed after having been disabled by
| polio.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Ah. I presumed you were talking about Charles Kettering,
| who also was one of the developers of leaded gasoline (and
| Freon).
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Breakfast time, Grommit!
| dopamean wrote:
| There's a great QAA Podcast episode about it.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Perhaps it's for the best that he didn't survive. Given his
| track record, _we_ probably wouldn 't have survived whatever he
| came up with next.
| asdff wrote:
| Just wait for the follow up study in 70 years on the
| microplastics and the brake and tire dust. It is amazing how much
| we've disturbed the world and our own population through
| industrialization. And most of it wasn't even beneficial to us!
| Weigh the industrial efforts to build public infrastructure or
| anything collectively beneficial like medicine against the
| useless consumer crap product economy that is doomed for a
| landfill before long and its not even close. Thats the junk
| that's backing up the ports and freight railways: not parts for
| trains or precursors for medicines. And it continues because
| there's just too much money to be made for anyone to stop for a
| second and consider the direction we are heading based on what
| our actions actually do for this planet. There's no real
| leadership on this planet capable of creating actual significant
| change, only people put in power to preside over the profitable
| status quo.
| xeromal wrote:
| I believe tire dust is about 40% plastics so add that the
| microplastics bin + the other stuff off of it.
| benterix wrote:
| Brake dust is comparable to tyre dust BTW:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026974912.
| ..
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Drum brakes can capture this dust for safe disposal, but
| are seen as old fashioned and for poor people.
| more_corn wrote:
| This is not true. Drum brakes are not sealed.
| sokoloff wrote:
| They are not sealed perfectly, but every drum that I've
| removed had a pile of shoe dust that was a _very
| significant_ fraction of the original mass of the shoe
| friction material worn. I'd estimate that 50% or more of
| the material ends up at the workshop instead of along the
| roadside.
| toast0 wrote:
| The interwebs say that disc brakes are better able to
| dissipate heat, provide more consistent braking
| performance, and generally reduce stopping distance.
|
| Drum brakes _are_ old fashioned, most US vehicles
| switched to at least disc brakes in the front in the late
| 1970s and early 80s. Drums in the rear make the parking
| brake simple, and rear brake performance is less
| important as more braking force comes from the front.
|
| I don't know about being "for poor people", except that
| poor people may be more likely to have older vehicles,
| but I don't know that that extends to using vehicles
| _that_ old, most vehicles with drums are 40+ years old at
| this point, and keeping something that old alive starts
| to get spendy because parts are trickier to find, and it
| costs time or money or both to adapt parts from other
| vehicles (like upgrading to disc brakes from a newer car)
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Some modern EVs already use drum brakes on the rear.
| Since they have regenerative breaking you don't get brake
| fade on long downhills.
|
| New EU regulations are coming in to limit brake dust and
| so people are looking at them again. And other ideas,
| like mercedes has a prototype that puts the brake inside
| the motor.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Note that some cars have parking/emergency brakes as drum
| brakes in the center of a rotor that provides disc brakes
| for the service ("normal") brakes, so you can still get
| disc braking performance with the parking brake cable
| mechanism.
|
| Drum brakes are also slightly more efficient, with the
| shoes exhibiting less drag when not applied, which is
| important on small battery EVs. (They are worse for high-
| energy or repeated braking, but better in cruise.)
| more_corn wrote:
| Regenerative braking converts 90% of braking from pad on
| rotor to running an electrical generator.
| observationist wrote:
| If it costs more to replace degraded magnets or motors
| every million miles compared to brake pads, it will raise
| the cost of transportation. It's also not feasible to use
| in ICE vehicles - once you've filled your battery, the
| only place for that energy to go is heat.
|
| It's not just a tradeoff between ICE and electric, or
| drum vs pad brakes, or rubber additive A vs B. It's a
| complex ecosystem upon which people's lives and
| livelihoods are dependent, with unpredictable and chaotic
| relationships.
|
| The naive view is to simply replace the apparently "bad"
| material in tire dust, but if that raises the cost of
| transportation, food prices go up, quality of life goes
| down, nutrition suffers, and possible downstream effects
| end up causing more harm than good.
|
| This isn't to say we shouldn't bother, just that a
| superficial approach targeted at a single issue could end
| up doing a lot of unintended damage, and there's no
| bounded scale of harm. Trying to reduce cancer rates by
| .0001% might end up reducing average lifespan by a
| decade, or some other consequence that's orders of
| magnitude more impactful than the thing being "fixed".
|
| We live in a complex and dynamic system; the supply chain
| sits at the base of it all. We benefit from the economies
| of scale serving the supply chain, so we have access to
| cheap vehicles, efficient and cheap long haul trucks give
| us access to food and products. Tinker with that too
| aggressively and people can die.
|
| The best route toward action on things like this are
| cultural - educate individuals and make alternatives
| available. People can adjust at their own convenience,
| and the trend of markets will resolve on a balance
| between health and safety risks and convenience.
|
| You could simply ban private cars, and presumably 35k
| fewer deaths would occur each year in the US, and we
| could work on monolithic solutions to things like brake
| dust and tire dust. We've decided that our collective
| quality of life and the benefits conferred us by allowing
| private transportation far outweigh the harms. We need to
| find where the balance is between the potential harms of
| these dusts and how much we're willing to give up in
| mitigating those harms.
|
| Anyway - it's not a trivial exercise, it's a microcosm of
| the global economy, with surprising complexity and
| dependencies at every level.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Here's the thing that makes tire dust and lead different: at
| least we get some measurable value from the tires. You can
| argue that our transportation system is wasteful, that we can
| use better means and modes, smaller vehicles and tires, but it
| remains true that we get non-zero benefit from the process any
| way you look at it.
|
| In the case of leaded gas we got literally no benefit. There
| was never a legitimate reason to put lead in motor fuels.
| JoshTko wrote:
| I'm sure there can be many mitigation approaches that could
| reduce tire dust exposure by an order of magnitude if
| regulated. Vehicle weight limits in high density residential
| areas, plastic mix % in tires, toxic chemical limits in
| tires, etc.
| benterix wrote:
| > smaller vehicles and tires
|
| That's the easy model where you basically know what you are
| doing is wrong but you like it so you decide to do less of
| it. The net result is still positive.
|
| An alternative approach is to try to actually innovate and/or
| invest in means of transport that don't require tyres nor
| friction for braking (e.g. eddy current brakes).
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Didn't (early) engines run significantly better with it? Less
| knocking, if nothing else?
|
| That was the stated rationale, anyway. It was an anti-knock
| compound. So, was that false? Did it not help knocking at
| all? Or was reducing knocking not a benefit at all?
| maxerickson wrote:
| You also have to consider alternatives. Ethanol was skipped
| because it was more expensive, and then we circled back
| around once we realized that we were contaminating ground
| water with MTBE.
| nayuki wrote:
| > In the case of leaded gas we got literally no benefit.
| There was never a legitimate reason to put lead in motor
| fuels.
|
| That's not true. The benefit was anti-knocking without using
| more expensive high-octane fuel (or later, ethanol).
|
| It was still a terrible, terrible decision though, given the
| centuries of knowledge that lead is a poison.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Ethanol was a choice at the time. The fuel companies didn't
| like the idea of putting what was essentially a competing
| fuel in their fuel to make it work better and went with the
| known poison instead.
| int_19h wrote:
| Ethanol has its own downsides.
|
| When thinking about the explanations, keep in mind that
| leaded gas adoption was near-universal, including
| economies where "companies" or "competing fuel" weren't
| really a thing in that sense - e.g. USSR. They still went
| for leaded gas because of its objective benefits.
|
| And even today, we still use leaded gas for aviation...
|
| It is a horrible trade-off either way, but it was not
| done for no gain at all.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Sure there was - lead in fuel increased fuel economy/engine
| performance.
| hereme888 wrote:
| How would you go about dealing with tire dust pollution in a
| sensible way that doesn't destroy the global economy?
|
| I'm all for it, I'm for policies that "force" people to change
| certain careers or lifestyles in a sensible way, and I'm sure
| there's a good solution however imperfect it may be.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Tax it. Do a carbon tax too while we are at it.
| hereme888 wrote:
| So we pay more for tires, the pollution keeps happening,
| and the extra money is used for virtue signaling with
| minimal change?
| oefnak wrote:
| No, investing in healthier tires becomes economically
| viable.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| There will be less pollution if polluting costs more
| netsharc wrote:
| Norway taxes ICE cars extremely highly (more performance
| meant more tax), EVs don't have this tax, so people who
| liked performance loved EVs.. Result: >80% of new cars
| are EVs...
|
| But oh, just "virtue signalling!". Why should anyone do
| anything without consulting the genius know-it-all that
| is hereme888?
| jajko wrote:
| That's the problem with populists (not bashing OP here, just
| general observations) - its trivial to pinpoint failings or
| potential problems down the line in modern society, we are
| all hyper-exposed to various info about them from all
| directions.
|
| Now coming up with a reasonable acceptable good solution that
| would actually work long term and not bring down civilization
| to its knees, that's another level very rarely seen.
|
| Something much better than 'X is a problem, although with
| 10,000 side effects, dependencies and benefits, so lets
| attack X mindlessly full force with no second thought'. It
| would appeal to me when I was maybe in 15-18, but
| understanding how hyper complex and connected whole world is
| can be sometimes quite depressing.
| lobsterthief wrote:
| We can require that different tire material be used--more
| natural rubbers can be used (albeit at a slightly higher
| cost) that produce less harmful dust.
| pfdietz wrote:
| What is the evidence that natural rubber is less harmful?
| mistercheph wrote:
| You don't start with evidence, you don't even start with
| a hypothesis, you start with an aesthetic intuition and
| chase it, like a heliocentric model with ptolemaic
| epicycles vs newton's model, both describe the phenomena
| at hand, how do we pick the one that guides our next
| questions?
|
| The intuition that we should globoindustrially produce
| man-made materials and dispose of novel waste materials
| in our water supplies until proven toxic and cancerous is
| a mistake, and we should be coming at the question from
| the other side, assume naturally occurring materials are
| less harmful than man-made ones until we have evidence
| indicating otherwise.
|
| It turns out that it is really, _really_ hard and
| motivated work to find evidence of the harmfulness of
| many materials, and there is no commercial incentive to
| do so, and the health of human beings and the natural
| world are suffering because we accept "three papers in
| the last 2 years checked this novel plastic and couldn't
| find much evidence of harm" as a good enough answer
| before we start manufacturing thousands of tons of it and
| dumping the manufacturing wastes into our rivers.
| pfdietz wrote:
| So, we should consider materials dangerous because of
| aesthetic feelings, not evidence, and that lack of
| evidence should be taken as evidence they are dangerous?
|
| I don't think you realize you've descended in self parody
| here.
| mistercheph wrote:
| How much evidence is sufficient to establish harmfulness
| or the absence of harmfulness? How do you determine, in
| general, the sufficiency of evidence to answer any given
| question where our primary access to knowledge is
| empirical correlation? You can keep yourself afloat a
| little longer with some yarn about basing that standard
| on some other empirical residue, but why that empirical
| residue and not another one? If you consider the question
| seriously, you will realize that at the bottom is not a
| set of empirical facts that control our investigations,
| and how we decide what their conclusions are, but
| aesthetic intuitions. As noticed by Kepler, Newton,
| Einstein, Schrodinger, et al.
|
| And in my view, we have enough evidence that the
| standards of evidence used by the present regime of
| medical and ecological scholarship to establish the
| absence of long term environmental and health risks of
| novel materials, are seriously insufficient, and the
| solution must come externally, derived from the mode of
| knowledge which "science" is subject to and not master
| of. That mode of knowledge which is capable of hearing
| all the mountains of papers screaming that "we've checked
| and everything is all groovy man nothing wrong in this
| asbestos here!" and pointing at the world and saying,
| "Either your mode of investigation was flawed, or your
| evidence was fabricated, so we should check again."
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| As I understand it, a major problem with tyre pollution is
| the 6PPD-Quinone used.
|
| https://avadaenvironmental.com/2024/05/27/the-
| environmental-...
| pfdietz wrote:
| And a chemical like this is needed to protect natural
| rubber from ozone.
|
| However, I doubt this specific chemical could not be
| replaced in that role, now that we know it's a problem.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| The same way we reduced pollution from tailpipes. Studies,
| tests and legislation.
|
| Weirdly enough in the US there is the UTQG (Uniform Tire
| Quality Grading) which includes treadwear, and the EU tire
| label does not. The EU label does include noise, but the US
| one does not.
|
| In general treadwear warranties are a thing here in the
| states, but I've never seen them in Europe.
|
| I wonder if this is why tires are louder here in the states,
| are harder tires last longer.
| tivert wrote:
| > How would you go about dealing with tire dust pollution in
| a sensible way that doesn't destroy the global economy?
|
| Just thinking off the top of my head, but build out rail
| infrastructure to decrease long-distance truck transport and
| replace it with rail freight? Trains have metal wheels, so no
| tire dust.
|
| For some of the other stuff, I'd really like to see
| durability/repairability prioritized over lowest _initial_
| purchase cost, as well as disposability be greatly
| discouraged (at least when it comes to plastic). My intuition
| is that could also lead to a lower TCO for a lot of products.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| I'm skeptical. There are far too many other parameters we know to
| be largely unrelated to lead exposure (e.g. Roe v Wade) that are
| very difficult to control for. There are too many lead sources--
| even banned ones--that remain in environments.
|
| Of course, I don't want to dismiss the study. I just want to
| dismiss jumping to conclusions and overemphasizing one source of
| change.
| quickslowdown wrote:
| Still? You're still skeptical, after all these decades of
| research & being able to draw direct, 1:1 lines between lead
| exposure and the health issues it causes?
|
| There's plenty of room for debate on how to fix this problem.
| The debate on _if_ it 's a problem has been dead for decades,
| if not centuries.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Lead poisoning was written about in Roman times, so you could
| argue that it's millennia of research. (There's a theory that
| the fall of the Roman empire was due to lead poisoning -
| likely from lead-lined aqueducts). However, after the Romans,
| it wasn't picked up again until the 17th century, so quite
| plausibly "centuries" of research.
|
| Of course, it used to be relatively easy to avoid lead
| poisoning (e.g. not using it for water pipes) until we
| started to pump lots of it into the air around the 1950s.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| The Romans didn't need to get it from the water, they
| directly used it as a flavoring called "sapa." Apparently
| it was one of the first artificial sweeteners and is
| actually pretty delicious.
| hereme888 wrote:
| Consider this study next time someone says "don't worry, the
| amount of our chemical in the product is minimal, well below the
| 'toxic threshhold', and safe to the environment."
|
| Novec is the latest one I can recall, now being discontinued due
| to environmental and health hazards of forever chemicals.
|
| One day we'll find out just how toxic the effects of trace
| pharmaceuticals in the environment, food, and water supply have
| been.
| guerrilla wrote:
| This leads to a serious epistemic crisis where if we are all
| rational then we all must endeavor to understand that we know
| nothing about these things. Think about Wi-Fi. You're now going
| to have to empathize directly with all the people that don't
| understand it. Since we can't know everything and we can't
| trust anyone, we must resign to knowing nothing about any of
| this in general. Best to err on the side of caution though,
| since now the chance of something being terrible for us is
| 50/50.
| hereme888 wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow you.
|
| The history of poorly-vetted (or "biasly-vetted") chemicals
| and trace pharmaceuticals is long and well established. I'm
| just advocating to advocate for your own health above
| trusting corporate statements further refined by a marketing
| team.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I wrote hastily but I said a couple of different things. I
| meant first that we should not presume to know that the
| corporate statements are true or false, but at the same
| time err on the side of caution due to the long and well
| established track record that you refer to. We can't assume
| they're dangerous or not dangerous, since we can't really
| know unless we're an expert in that particular domain, but
| we won't be experts in all domains relevant to our health,
| so it makes sense to remain neutrally skeptical while being
| more risk averse here. Then I was saying that this forces
| us to empathize with the people who think 5G and Wi-Fi are
| going to kill them due because they don't understand
| physics. Their claims are too strong, but their risk
| aversion due to their ignorance isn't and now we can
| relate. Do you get what I mean?
| neves wrote:
| what about lead in pipes?
|
| Can I detect if there is lead in the water I drink?
| toast0 wrote:
| It's easy to determine if pipes are made of lead if you can
| access the pipes. It's less easy to determine if they have some
| residual lead from upstream pipes that's settled into the
| corrosion layer on the inside of the pipe (and could be
| released later)
|
| There are testing services and test strips available for
| testing your water, which works even if you can't access all
| the pipes on the way between your source and your sink. A
| testing service will likely check for a list of contaminants
| and not simply lead, and most likely have better accuracy and
| precision than test strips you use yourself.
| thephyber wrote:
| My county water district publishes the monthly report of
| detected levels of all of the regulated items:
| https://www.valleywater.org/your-water/water-quality/water-q...
|
| They also say that lead is rarely injected into the water
| supply from the water supplier or water mains, but usually much
| closer to the home (eg. "Goosenecks").
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