this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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History Memes
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I've read theories that part of the... let's call it "general cognitive decline" among certain populations in the US is due to widespread chronic lead poisoning. I don't know if any studies have ever been done but it kind of makes sense on the surface. If paint and fuel contained lead, it would have been nearly impossible to avoid exposure to it.
Lead exposure is, in particular, linked to aggression and impulsive behavior
And out big wet boy is going to make sure they never take our lead https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-plan-to-make-america-healthy-again-continued-exposure-to-lead-in-water/
It's got what plants crave, though.
Point of use filtration, i.e. distilation, or RO (reverse osmosis), will remove heavy metals, and other things you don't want to be consuming.
Too expensive for the average family. Can we not just get safe drinking water to everyone through the tap? What would it cost, one more fighter jet?
The last tranche of investment in clean water infrastructure was some $35 billion. Cost of an F-22, from development all the way to production, over the course of 20+ years, is about 350 million per unit.
So for slightly over half of all F-22s in the USAF, you could get a one (1) time investment of insufficient size and scale of the kind we had during the Biden years.
Where that leaves the number for a successful investment in clean water is probably quick gruesome.
Fair enough, but I'm curious about your numbers for clean water to every home and business. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't the majority of tap water in the country already safe? New York City has some of the cleanest trap water in the world.
https://www.epa.gov/infrastructure/water-infrastructure-investments
Despite that massive investment, we still have, and are projected to remain having, problems in many parts of the country supplying clean water to marginalized communities. Plumbing ain't cheap.
Yep. Which goes to show just how expensive uprooting and replacing the remainder is - not to mention maintaining the existing infrastructure.
This is the study cited by an article on the subject: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2118631119
This was the article I found about it: https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-shrunk-iq-scores-half-americans
A few years back we heard a lot about lead in / around Flint, MI. But that isn't the only, nor perhaps the worst place. smh. Point of use filtration is key. A second key point is to work to remove the heavy metals one already has accumulated.
Edited: Some OF the cognitive decline you are seeing more recently is from long term inflammation caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection, and PASC "LongCovid". Cognitive decline can last for a year or more after infection, even mild cases. The average in the US is 4+ cases per person. Someone might take a hit to their cognitive function, start to make progress on recovery, and then gets a second infection which takes them down further.
Decreases in frequency-dependent intrinsic activity of the default mode network are associated with depression and cognition in patients with postacute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39869209/
[Cognition and Long COVID: A PRISMA Systematic Review of Longitudinal Studies] (Spanish) - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/pmid/39910970/
Does it explain 2016 though
Er, no, I'm pretty sure 2016 was before SARS-CoV-2 historically speaking. Time is funny that way; maybe go ask a physicist about it sometime. Do you often ask questions, without a question mark, like above?
So according to wikipedia, the US banned lead paint in 1977, while Europe didn't implement such a ban until 2003 (though some EU countries had such laws before 2003). Additionally several countries are just now beginning to ban lead paints (Turkey, Ukraine, and Georgia didn't implement bans in after 2020).
While catchy, this argument feels tired.
Lead paint is fairly low on the scale, though obviously not great; leaded gasoline puts much more lead into the human body. Leaded gasoline was banned in both the US and EU in the 1990s.
Iirc the argument wasn't about paint so much as leaded gasoline, which gets in the environment and exposes everyone to high levels of lead.
Almost entirely from leaded gasoline. Not paint.
The paint was only banned because kids were eating some, sometimes and that was obviously bad.
Lead paint was really awesome, though. There still isn't any paint sold today that holds up as long as lead paint did. It also coated better and dried faster. The stuff was the best, so long as there weren't any kids around to put pieces of it in their mouths.