Lead poisoning is especially strange. I'm convinced that I have it, in contrast to the bipolar diagnosis I've been given. I used to do competitive shooting where I'd practice five days out of the week and compete on average of maybe once each weekend. The projectiles we shot were entirely lead, there was never any push for cleaning our hands, and the lead trap was never, ever cleaned (lead dust yay).
Problem is, every time I describe the problem and the reasoning behind it, no doctor takes me seriously to the point of laughing sometimes. It's ridiculous that lead's been researched so much, yet no doctor I've talked to understands it enough to even humor the idea. Not trying to self diagnose, but a little bit of "Hmm... yeah, maybe", would be nice.
I've also reached out to researchers in the field. The modern ones who've done extensive research have all moved to different fields and aren't willing to help out. Really frustrating. If anybody has any sources for help, I'd love it.
Have you considered a blood test? [1] You could probably get a referral for generic blood work easily (claim you're concerned about vitamin levels or something), and then ask the testing agency to check for lead levels.
Blood tests are useless after a certain point, as far as I know. The tests for neurological effects are a bit more complicated and require bone biopsies. Been a while since I've looked into it, so I might be wrong.
Just from quickly skimming the literature, it looks like you can measure it in vivo with X-ray fluorescence. Getting access to one of those would be hard, but you might be able to persuade a researcher to use you in a trial? I imagine you've already looked into this a fair bit.
Are you on medication to help with the (diagnosed) bipolar disorder? Do you find that e.g. lithium eases your symptoms? If so, I'd be inclined to think you're bipolar -- irrespective of whether you also have low-level lead poisoning.
Possible it was more than the lead bullets. Lead styphnate has been a component of centerfire ammo [1]. That use would put it in vapor form near the firearm where it could be readily inhaled.
I agree with another poster - get tested for lead. No matter whether damage done is irreversible or not, it's good to prevent further damage.
The pellets have nothing to do with it - the lead styphnate is used as the primer charge (which then detonates the gunpower). That's why it tends to be aerosolized.
Then it's not a centerfire cartridge - there's no cartridge nor primer in an air rifle :)
I thought centerfire + small pellets meant you were talking about birdshot though a shotgun, like competitive skeet or trap shooting. But I guess there aren't too many indoor ranges for that (although there is at least one - the MSZU complex in Germany). Or perhaps one of the .177 cartridges like .17 HM2.
So we're probably talking about lead contamination on your hands, then. You can clean that off by washing your hands, and as long as you did so after shooting and particularly before you eat, I think you'd probably have been fine. But I'm not a doctor.
Well, there was rim fire and there was centerfire. The only reason I know that is because the rim fire rifles couldn't be dry fired. Specifically, I was shooting anschutz rifles (at a busy train station or else I'd google it :p.)
The hand contamination was definitely a thing. We weren't ever advised on washing our hands properly, so that risk is pretty high especially considering we would often eat snacks after. It was pretty irresponsible of all parties, but I have a hard time blaming my 16 year old self and my peers. The coach should've known better, though. The other concern was that here was a trap 10m down the line which flew up dust - apparently it was too expensive to clean (go figure). We'd sweep the ground, too, which kicked up a surprising amount of fine dust. Can't say for sure how much of that was lead.
I've thought about raising this as a legal issue, but if doctors can't take it seriously, I wouldn't even know where to begin on the legal front.
I wouldn't doubt it, but it's hard to get back in contact with most of them to confirm. . There was a research paper about an Alaskan rifle team which talks about short term lead poisoning effects, though. I'd imagine they suffered long term effects. I can't find the longer version after a few searches, though.
How is this even remotely good science? So far as I can tell, they didn't admit the possibility that this can be either complete noise (if you have, say 100 diseases, and you're looking for time-series correlations, or performing tests with too low an alpha or power) or caused by a confounder.
The task of making causal claims is a difficult one, and not one to be made lightly. The literature is replete with examples of this going terribly wrong, even with perceived physical justifications. See
> Our second identification strategy, introduced by Troesken (2006) and Clay et al. (2014), exploits the fact that more lead particulate will leach into water with low pH levels. If lead exposure has a causal effect on homicide, more acidic water should be correlated with higher homicide rates only in cities that used lead water pipes.
So there's more causal evidence than appears in the Mother Jones article. The two references for their "identification strategy" don't seem particularly well-cited though. [1][2]
The article is bad (MotherJones), the paper may be better [1]. I've only skimmed it, but it looks at the correlation between distance from a lead factory and homicide rate, which probably increases the signal/noise ratio.
An important concern in a cross-sectional study such as ours is that the cities that installed lead pipes in the nineteenth century might have differed from the cities that did not in unobserved ways that were correlated with their homicide rates. Based on available data on the characteristics of the cities in our sample, we find little evidence that the cities that used lead pipes differed in observable ways from the cities that did not. Although larger cities, denser cities, and cities with comparatively low rates of home ownership were more likely to have used lead pipes, so were better-educated cities. High-homicide southern cities, meanwhile, were less likely to have used lead pipes. When we predict whether cities used lead pipes using all covariates, the only difference that remains statistically significant is the city population.
Using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) sample of the 1900 census, we calculate several city-level covariates that could be correlated with both lead pipe use and crime.17 These include each city’s population, population density, home ownership rate, and literacy rate, the share of each city’s population composed of African Americans, foreign-born residents, and single men aged 18 to 40, and the share of each city’s employed population working in manufacturing. We also create covariates for cities’ latitude and longitude...
> I don't have time to check out the article this week, but will soon.
Maybe reading first before accusing them of bad science is a good idea?
"Third, a city-level analysis such as ours does not suffer from a common problem with individual-level studies, namely that individuals exposed to lead typically come from poor neighborhoods with both low-quality housing and high crime rates. Common confounders of the lead-crime relationship in individual-level studies pose less of a problem in our city-level study, where in most cases the entire city population was exposed to lead through water."
The real targets here are the crime rates, and the diseases known to be side effects of lead poisoning. And the question is, can we use high level aggregates to observe lead poisoning caused by industrial design decisions?
We've seen massive drops on the level of violent crime in the US (and beyond) over the last twenty or thirty years. And the attribution of that drop has huge ramifications. Should we double down on three-strikes laws, or can the drop be attributed to environmental factors like ambient lead levels due to leader gasoline?
What I see here is increased evidence for the lead poisoning hypothesis. We know that lead poisoning causes violent behavior; the evidence is indicating that elevated crime rates may be due to undiagnosed poisoning.
A lot of crimes in prisons goes unreported, so total crime stats are harder to calculate. EX: Murder seems to clearly be down, male on male rape may be up.
Female on male rape is up too, outside of prisons of course. Federal statistics in the past 4 years place unreported female on male rape about as high as all male on female rape. They still call it "made to penetrate" and classify it as 'mere' sexual assault though.
> Cities that used iron pipes, in contrast, had higher rates of death from circulatory disease, cancer, and cerebral hemorrhage. We know of no scientific literature to motivate these latter relationships.
Is it possible that this is just because people weren't dying of other things first?
> That tip took Nevin in a different direction. The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn't paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.
> Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.
> So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.
> And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to "fill 'er up with ethyl," they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later.
Well he was certainly after a result he wanted, lead was phased out of house paints starting after 1971 and gone by 1978, meaning anything built before 78 was suspect. This may still be a problem in some older housing especially in cities. Leaded gasoline didn't fully phase out until the 80s and was still for sale in places until 91. Even in Canada leaded gasoline wasn't banned until 1990.
So while it definitely had a large influence we have to realize lead was everywhere, it was cheap, it had so many wonderful uses, but it most certainly didn't vanish in the seventies.
In 1973 the US mandated all new cars require unleaded gasoline. They had smaller filling ports so leaded pump nozzles couldn't be inserted. So no, leaded fuel wasn't banned then, but it's usage decreased rapidly from that year on.
Do you agree that human's use of fossil fuels caused global warming? We only know that they're correlated, right? It was a singular event without a control that we discovered by analyzing historical data. A lot like this article's subject.
If you know nothing else about A and B it actually does. In terms of pure information theory / probability. Causation between random things is rare and causation is less rare in correlated things.
Crime trends are hard, and every theory we have seems to have its own set of weird statistical quirks.
That "we don't know much" nuance rarely makes it into short articles. The closest I've seen is in the Atlantic, where they basically have a whole series devoted to problems with no easy answers.
Maybe the lead theory is right, but these are tough issues that are well studied, full of methodological hazards, so it's worth being extremely cautious when interpreting results about anything that drives crime trends.
> That "we don't know much" nuance rarely makes it into short articles.
Well it made it into this one:
Click on my post from last year to get more details about both the strengths and weaknesses of this paper. As with any retrospective study like this, there are reasons to be cautious about the results.
Clicking the link gives us a pretty nuanced discussion:
On the negative side, it's risky to look solely at homicide numbers. This is because the absolute number of murders is small, especially on a city-by-city basis, and that means there's a lot of noise in the numbers. This is especially true when you're limited to a period of time as short as 15 years. There's also the fact that this was an era when lead paint was widely used, and that's very hard to tease out from the use of lead in pipes. Finally, there's the usual problem of any study like this: what do you control for? The use of lead pipes is plausibly unrelated to anything else related to crime, but it's impossible to know for sure. The authors do control for black population, foreign-born population, occupations, home ownership, and gender breakdown, and that reduces their effect size from 11.4 percent to 8.6 percent. Might some other control reduce it even further?
Plus there's the anomaly of Southern cities. Very few of them used lead pipes, but some did, and their murder rates were essentially no different from any other Southern cities. Why? It's possible that this is because their use of lead pipes was small (F&M have data on lead pipe use by city, but not on how much lead piping was used in each city). But it's still odd.
> there are reasons to be cautious about the results
But that's immediately followed by,
> However, the main strength of this study is unquestionably important: it verifies the lead-crime link in [a new] environment...
That's not the level of nuance I'm looking for.
More specifically, I think articles tend to be stronger when they acknowledge that there are multiple theories for crime trends, several of which have some explanatory power, none of which really gives a complete picture.
If the title were "Lead contributed to higher crime rates" rather than "Lead caused higher crime rates," that would be the sort of concession I'm looking for.
Unreservedly agree with you about the older piece though. Even without discussing alternative theories, Drum's earlier article is a good example of science journalism that puts a paper in perspective, (titled "some new evidence" rather than "X causes Y"), and the content is really well balanced.
Around 1900, the "tin" in tin cans contained about 12% lead, which leached into fruits and vegetables. You have to wonder if there's any way of correcting for that. [Source: "The Great A&P" by Marc Levinson, page 50.][Edit: read the paper cited and they make no mention of this]
Do you suspect that lead to be distributed in a way that would confound the results? In the absence of a theory, I'd expect lead to be fairly evenly distributed amongst cities in that particular way.
Speaking of Flint (and Chicago as well), why are murders/shootings at new highs when they went down in the 90's like in every other area? Did they starting using lead paint again in the 80's?
Pretty sure the up-tick has more to do with socioeconomics and the drug war than anything else.
I don't have any sources at hand, so take this with a grain of salt. But, I've often seen it argued that Reagan era drug policies were detrimental to poor minorities, especially black men. The problems we see today are the trickle-down effects (couldn't resist) of turning an entire generation of fathers into disenfranchised criminals.
Throwing a generation of fathers in jail for trivial offenses not only erodes confidence in the judicial system, it leaves children without a role model.
Like if dad's in jail, who cares if you end up there eventually.
Prison isn't a deterrent any more. In some communities doing time is just part of growing up.
Well the lead removal has reduced crime, but the plastic replacement pipes and the hormone disrupting chemicals contained within are certainly having a great effect! Wonder if they will start to chart that?
The media refuses to say where the Flint, MI lead is coming from. It's coming from lead pipes in private residences, since the minerals in the water have changed.
I get all my science from motherjones.com! From fluoride to sugar to weed, this is where Pulitzer meets Nobel.
Seriously though: a motherjones.com post of this quality as #1 on HN is a new low. I miss the days of pg obsessively micromanaging everything 'round these parts.
Yes obviously prohibition and organized crime are minor factors in homicide rates very convenient
time period chosen. In larger urban areas using more lead pipes is obviously a dominating factor and obviously not being a major black markets in prohibition era and thus center for organized crime.
You are right but having stats background it get's tiresome looking at how people are abusing the craft. There is obviously little harm from a "study" like this, but this sad state of things affects much more critical areas like medical field. You see so much of misuse and misapplication makes you angry after a while.
You're assuming your points were valid. Since you didn't really argue them, they might not be. In that case, you aren't justified in getting angry at this article any more than you are in getting angry at every paper using stats ever published. Perhaps this is one of the rare good ones.
If you can't isolate other factors the stats treatment becomes meaningless. Since there is concentration of crime in prohibition era in major urban areas you can by the same token observe a very strong correlation between number of restrooms in the city and a homicide rate or any other meaningless factor related to population size.
Wasnt prohibition everywhere in the States, while lead pipes weren't?
Can you show a study based on 100 year old data that isn't flawed? I don't get what you think they should have done?
Problem is, every time I describe the problem and the reasoning behind it, no doctor takes me seriously to the point of laughing sometimes. It's ridiculous that lead's been researched so much, yet no doctor I've talked to understands it enough to even humor the idea. Not trying to self diagnose, but a little bit of "Hmm... yeah, maybe", would be nice.
I've also reached out to researchers in the field. The modern ones who've done extensive research have all moved to different fields and aren't willing to help out. Really frustrating. If anybody has any sources for help, I'd love it.