[Newsbot]

Title: Leaded Gasoline Linked to the Rise and Fall of Violent Crime : US/World : Medical Daily
Category: Health
Posted By: DrCaleb
Date: 2013-01-07 14:15:40
Canadian

[martin14]

Interesting, wonder how it also compares to getting lead pipes out of the system for drinking water.

[bootlegga]

Good find DrC, interesting read!

[Zipperfish]

martin14 martin14:

Interesting, wonder how it also compares to getting lead pipes out of the system for drinking water.

Probably not as much as wiht leaded gas. The "lead" in leaded gas is tetraethyl lead--a heavy organometal. Becasue it is in organic form (attached to four -ethyl groups) it is much more easily metabolized by the body. And lead, like many heavy metals, is known to be a potent neurotoxin.



Metallic lead (as in lead pipes) has the same impact, but because it isn't already in organic form, it takes a heck of a lot more of it to notice an effect.

[DrCaleb]

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

martin14 martin14:

Interesting, wonder how it also compares to getting lead pipes out of the system for drinking water.

Probably not as much as wiht leaded gas. The "lead" in leaded gas is tetraethyl lead--a heavy organometal. Becasue it is in organic form (attached to four -ethyl groups) it is much more easily metabolized by the body. And lead, like many heavy metals, is known to be a potent neurotoxin.



Metallic lead (as in lead pipes) has the same impact, but because it isn't already in organic form, it takes a heck of a lot more of it to notice an effect.

To add to Zips post:

$1:

In the fall of 1924, five bodies from New Jersey were delivered to the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office. You might not expect those out-of-state corpses to cause the chief medical examiner to worry about the dirt blowing in Manhattan streets. But they did.

To understand why you need to know the story of those five dead men, or at least the story of their exposure to a then mysterious industrial poison.

The five men worked at the Standard Oil Refinery in Bayway, New Jersey. All of them spent their days in what plant employees nicknamed “the loony gas building”, a tidy brick structure where workers seemed to sicken as they handled a new gasoline additive. The additive’s technical name was tetraethyl lead or, in industrial shorthand, TEL. It was developed by researchers at General Motors as an anti-knock formula, with the assurance that it was entirely safe to handle.

But, as I wrote in a previous post, men working at the plant quickly gave it the “loony gas” tag because anyone who spent much time handling the additive showed stunning signs of mental deterioration, from memory loss to a stumbling loss of coordination to sudden twitchy bursts of rage. And then in October of 1924, workers in the TEL building began collapsing, going into convulsions, babbling deliriously. By the end of September, 32 of the 49 TEL workers were in the hospital; five of them were dead.

The problem, at that point, was that no one knew exactly why. Oh, they knew – or should have known – that tetraethyl lead was dangerous. As Charles Norris, chief medical examiner for New York City pointed out, the compound had been banned in Europe for years due to its toxic nature. But while U.S. corporations hurried TEL into production in the 1920s, they did not hurry to understand its medical or environmental effects.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/ ... d-history/

[desertdude]

FFS, seriously ?

Maybe the crime rate dropped because more people could afford to have pools in their houses.... before the economy crashed ! Maybe its this Global Warming thing, thats having an effect on crime rate.

Sometimes I wonder about these "studies".

[Brenda]

desertdude desertdude:

FFS, seriously ?

Maybe the crime rate dropped because more people could afford to have pools in their houses.... before the economy crashed ! Maybe its this Global Warming thing, thats having an effect on crime rate.

Sometimes I wonder about these "studies".

You mean "pools strapped on their waists", right?

[BartSimpson]

Coincidence is not causality. At the same time that the developed world removed ethylene lead from gasoline they also started putting aluminum fluoride and sodium fluoride into municipal water supplies. Meaning that you could also attribute fluoridated water to declining crime rates if you want to. Or, what the hell?, you can also attribute declining crime rates to the indices of anthropogenic global warming which also occurs in the same time frame.

[bootlegga]

desertdude desertdude:

FFS, seriously ?

Maybe the crime rate dropped because more people could afford to have pools in their houses.... before the economy crashed ! Maybe its this Global Warming thing, thats having an effect on crime rate.

Sometimes I wonder about these "studies".

Who knows - maybe the build up of lead in one's body leads to unnatural aggression or something.

Hmmm, sounds like a story idea...

[Thanos]

Stands to reason that environmental exposure to bad toxic things can lead to more than just physical problems. It's probably racist to say so but I remain convinced that a large number of the social problems the Natives have can be traced to four or five generations of them suffering from widespread fetal alcohol syndrome in their communities. The violence in the American Old West was certainly greatly magnified by the type of subgrade witches brews of whiskey that the cowpokes, miners, and farmers were consuming. The Prohibition of alcohol that came later was in part due to repetitive incidents of crazed drunks gunning each other down in the streets while they were out of their minds on alcoholic beverages that contained only God-knows-what kind of unregulated and poisonous substances.

If Big Government should be appreciated for anything it's that regulations have created a moment in time where, for the vast, vast majority of products that are now sold, our food and beverages are as safe to consume as they've ever been. Ditto for other regulations that came along, like the ones that eliminated lead from fuels and paints. The people who advocate gutting government regulations that make life safer for practically everyone in the name of their weird anti-social ideal of "freedom" should be ashamed of themselves. The industries that have already historically demonstrated that they'd willing sacrifice public health for the sake of improving their overall profits simply cannot be trusted to do these things themselves.

[BartSimpson]

bootlegga bootlegga:

Who knows - maybe the build up of lead in one's body leads to unnatural aggression or something.

In my personal experience I've found that increasing the amount of lead in someone's body by at least 400 grains ends their aggressive tendencies quite effectively.

[Zipperfish]

desertdude desertdude:

FFS, seriously ?

Maybe the crime rate dropped because more people could afford to have pools in their houses.... before the economy crashed ! Maybe its this Global Warming thing, thats having an effect on crime rate.

Sometimes I wonder about these "studies".

Ever heard the term "Mad as a hatter." That was due to hatter using mercury (another heavy metal) to make felt, resulting sever neurological (and kidney) damage. So it's not like the idea is unprecedented.

[herbie]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Coincidence is not causality. At the same time that the developed world removed ethylene lead from gasoline they also started putting aluminum fluoride and sodium fluoride into municipal water supplies. Meaning that you could also attribute fluoridated water to declining crime rates if you want to. Or, what the hell?, you can also attribute declining crime rates to the indices of anthropogenic global warming which also occurs in the same time frame.

Bart they've been putting fluoride in the water some places since after WWII. They didn't even start making unleaded gas until the mid-70s.
There are lots of places that don't fluoridate water today, lots of places like Canada where leaded gas has been banned for over 25 years.
One didn't end as the other started.
Flouride is a scientifically known medical benefit derided only by tin hats, tetraethyl-lead is a known biohazard.
If you want to argue the claim, you'd have to do it on the grounds of time: age of the study group? If it's an average of 30 years, they didn't get much exposure to lead.
Unless of course the USA didn't ban leaded gas until way after everyone else did.

[Proculation]

That's the first thing I had in mind after reading this: