Correlation is not causation, but honestly, I’m pretty sold by the data. It also correlates nicely to the rise and drop in violent crime! - ThreadSky

tkingfisher.com • 86 days ago

Correlation is not causation, but honestly, I’m pretty sold by the data. It also correlates nicely to the rise and drop in violent crime!

Reposted from Doc Vivi Leandra - Real-Life Scientist VTuber 🧬🖥️

Time to post The Graph again

Comments

eilatan.bsky.social•86 days ago

Yet another reason why Gen X is the best.

pavlovcat.bsky.social•86 days ago

I can only imagine what my childhood lead levels were as someone born in '76. We lived in a 1950's house three doors down from a 4 lane city street on the corner of which was a gas station. Also both my parents smoked.

drmag00.bsky.social•86 days ago

I've always found it weird, as a GenXer who is surrounded by other extremely progressive/liberal GenXers, but the data does not lie. We ate lead, and many of us are assholes.

cristyblue.bsky.social•86 days ago

Some places had cleaner air, if just the pattern of weather and prevailing winds.
Anecdotally, the people I know who are most likely to be lead affected - I can tell by behavior which ones grew up nearer a city and which ones grew up out in the boonies where you didn't see any cars really.

kwangger.bsky.social•86 days ago

i remember reading about how Maine had like crazy levels of smog because of the wind patterns picking it up from all the cities in the NE?

indrifan.bsky.social•86 days ago

But some of us were in the boonies and prying lead shot out of the target backdrop so we could play with it, or have our dads remelt it into bullets

indrifan.bsky.social•86 days ago

Granted, probably not a big enough demographic to bend the graph

textualdeviance.bsky.social•86 days ago

I know I got more than my fair share of it, too. My dad was a gearhead and there were always tons of cars all over our property, plus we had horrible smog and he made his own bullets. Melting lead in a cast-iron skillet in the carport? And then we used that skillet for food later? Ugh.

wulftrax.bsky.social•86 days ago

We also had smoking everywhere before the laws changed, so it's possible that also has something to do with it.

heatherolsenbabka.bsky.social•86 days ago

My childhood home ended up being a superfund site for lead. The soil was removed many years ago…grew up downwind of a lead refinery 🙃

mazarin221b.bsky.social•86 days ago

As someone who does lead cleanups, I am convinced about the causation here.

eilatan.bsky.social•86 days ago

Ooooh! Do you get to burn the dirt? I used to work at the plant that made all the lead for the leaded gasoline and we weren't allowed to touch the dirt bc it was so contaminated by lead (and other things).

mazarin221b.bsky.social•86 days ago

Lol, no, you can't burn the lead out. It just has to be carefully landfilled, unfortunately.

eilatan.bsky.social•86 days ago

Huh, someone I worked with who had done remediation work, told me it was burning the dirt. Maybe that was something else. I do know it's hella expensive to remediate lead contamination.

emilybunny.bsky.social•86 days ago

Maybe this is about TEL (tetraethyl lead), the fuel additive, which is much more dangerous than metallic lead or lead oxides? If you have TEL contamination, burning it into (still dangerous) lead oxide is the first thing I’d think to do.

mazarin221b.bsky.social•86 days ago

Our cleanups are depositional lead, usually from old smelters or other metalworking/industrial facilities. We have to have a source - lead from gasoline is so widespread that my program can't actually clean that up. Same for lead paint, which causes the most exposure.

mazarin221b.bsky.social•86 days ago

You can do thermal treatment, but not for lead. Thermal is for VOCs like dry cleaning fluid or other solvents.

secretlentil.bsky.social•86 days ago

Can you share more details?

mazarin221b.bsky.social•86 days ago

If you overlay EPA lead remediation sites, you'll find they are also in formerly redlined areas with higher levels of POC, lower income, lower academic achievement, and higher crime. It intersects with Environmental justice as well, which the Trump admin just killed.

secretlentil.bsky.social•86 days ago

Ahhh yes redlining. I'll never forget seeing the map of my city's redlining and how it translates to underserved neighborhoods now.

Thanks for you reply.

antimattr359.bsky.social•86 days ago

Looks like I'm not quite as lead poisoned as some older Gen Xers, but that's still too much red to see in that column. Yikes!

cinnamonremote.bsky.social•86 days ago

Turns out car break pads were full of lead & asbestos until recently. Or at least that was the excuse for why my new breaks are like a chorus of whistling squeaks of varying pitches because it’s all rusting steel now.

wiswell.bsky.social•86 days ago

Learning about the trends of unleaded gasoline blew my mind.

stacyking.bsky.social•86 days ago

Nobody show this to the current administration, or they might target those regulations next.

grumpymartian.bsky.social•86 days ago

And the fact that the same guy invented leaded gas and CFCs— and then died in a system of pulleys he invented himself—

chrismclaren.com•86 days ago

You should totally take 20 minutes for this:

daverodland.bsky.social•86 days ago

I have a whole schtick about this! The science building I teach in is named for the alum who first put tetraethyl lead additive into an internal combustion engine to test its anti-knock properties.

daverodland.bsky.social•86 days ago

The goal was to reduce engine wear from ethanol biofuels because known petroleum reserves were limited and we had to think about a sustainable energy transition before the inevitable oil crisis (this was around 1921, mind). https://environmentalhistory.org/people/charles-f-kettering-and-the-1921-discovery-of-tetraethyl-lead/

daverodland.bsky.social•86 days ago

Kettering seems to have been a grade-A sociopath, but Boyd wrote most of the first-draft history and I can't say he really took the dangers seriously either.

urnash.com•86 days ago

EXCELLENT *air guitar riff*

martha.net•86 days ago

...as a Gen Xer it makes me a little worried about turning into a horrible person against my will as I get older. 😭

helleborehound.bsky.social•86 days ago

What exactly is being measured on the Y axis? % of what? Max allowable level? Sorry if I just missed it

pebblesofskyblue.bsky.social•86 days ago

Hello, fellow hater of unlabelled axes! Every time I see this chart I think this

omegamom.bsky.social•86 days ago

Percent of population tested.

So, in 2015, *all* the people tested who were 41-49 years old had 15 mg/dL (not mg, but can’t make the symbol required) or higher levels of lead in their blood during childhood. (I’m assuming tests were run on stored blood samples.)

omegamom.bsky.social•86 days ago

Okay, tests were run at the time: “Serial, cross-sectional blood–lead level (BLL) data from National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), a nationally representative sample of US children aged 1 to 5 (n = 11,616) from 1976 to 1980 to 2015 to 2016”.

Paper:

helleborehound.bsky.social•86 days ago

Thank you so much!

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