lead – Techdirt (original) (raw)

CDC Decides America’s Children Could Do With More Lead In Their Blood

from the won't-somebody-poison-the-children!?! dept

With all the conversations we’ve had in the past few months about the decline of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the leadership, or lack thereof, of RFK Jr. and Donald Trump, you might have been left with the impression that everything at HHS is broken beyond repair. But that’s not entirely true. Despite the rash of budget, staff, and grant cuts that have kneecapped HHS, you can still get a great deal of information from the HHS website, for instance. As an example, here is the CDC site’s page providing information about lead poisoning in the country. It describes how the agency began measuring blood lead levels (BLLs) nationally in 1995 to find where elevated BLLs exist, especially in children, in order to deploy federal resources to combat its occurrence. The CDC page has this to say about BLLs generally in terms of their impact on children.

There is no known safe BLL. Exposure to lead can seriously harm a child’s health. Millions of children are being exposed to lead in their homes, increasing their risks for:

Well, I’m no doctor, but gosh golly gee, that seems bad! Like, the kind of thing a federal government that has protecting its own population as a supposed chief aim would want to combat. And, in touting its own progress on that same page, the CDC agreed at the time the page was written in 2024.

The decrease is most likely a result of an intense coordinated effort to control or eliminate lead sources in children’s environments by:

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is a child agency of HHS, has its own page on the topic as well. There they talk again about how this was historically a much larger problem, but one that still remains and needs to be addressed through a coordinated and likely federal effort.

Researchers estimate that half of the U.S. population, more than 170 million people, were exposed to harmful lead levels in early childhood. “The scope of such widespread exposure, particularly from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, suggests the legacy of lead continues to shape the health and wellbeing of the country in ways we do not yet fully understand,” according to the researchers. Lead exposure is associated with IQ loss, for which even small deficits can have a meaningful adverse effect on people’s lives and on society.

The Biden-Harris Administration actively works to protect communities from lead exposure. More than 9 million homes, schools, daycares, and businesses receive their drinking water through a lead pipe, putting people at risk of lead exposure. A whole-of-government effort is deploying resources across federal, state and local governments to address lead hazards. Read more in this May 2024 brief: $3 Billion to Replace Toxic Lead Pipes and Deliver Clean Drinking Water to Communities Across the Country.

There’s not a lot of ambiguity in any of this. Lead poisoning and any level of BLLs, particularly in children, are problems worthy of combatting. To say that we don’t want lead in the blood of our children ought to be as uncontroversial a position as one can take. And, yet, it appears that one of the victims of HHS’ budget slashing is the very program designed to help local communities, particularly those in poorer areas.

On April 1, the staff of the CDC’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program was terminated as part of the agency’s reduction in force, according to NPR. The staff included epidemiologists, statisticians, and advisors who specialized in lead exposures and responses.

The cuts were immediately consequential to health officials in Milwaukee, who are currently dealing with a lead exposure crisis in public schools. Six schools have had to close, displacing 1,800 students. In April, the city requested help from the CDC’s lead experts, but the request was denied—there was no one left to help.

That Milwaukee example is an interesting one, as it offers us yet another opportunity to watch RFK Jr. simply obfuscate and/or lie in response to it. In a hearing, members of Congress asked RFK Jr. directly about the Milwaukee issue. Kennedy assured those lawmakers that he had a crackerjack team from HHS on the ground in the city working on this. Turns out, not so much.

Milwaukee Health Commissioner Mike Totoraitis told NPR that this is false. “There is no team in Milwaukee,” he said. “We had a single [federal] staff person come to Milwaukee for a brief period to help validate a machine, but that was separate from the formal request that we had for a small team to actually come to Milwaukee for our Milwaukee Public Schools investigation and ongoing support there.”

Kennedy has also previously told lawmakers that lead experts at the CDC who were terminated would be rehired. But that statement was also false. The health department’s own communications team told ABC that the lead experts would not be reinstated.

Look, I realize that we’re in a brave new world in which Trump officials can just do whatever they want, say whatever they want, and that they all have an expectation that they are untouchable. But at some point, there have to be consequences for a Cabinet member sitting before Congress and lying through his teeth. Hearings. Inquiries. Charges for contempt of Congress, or for lying under oath. Something. Anything.

Children are suffering and will suffer even worse because of this nonsense, all while Kennedy plays “pin the tail on my own bullshit” with lawmakers. This simply cannot go on.

Filed Under: bll, blood lead levels, cdc, health and human services, hhs, lead, lead exposure, lead poisoning, maha, nih, rfk jr.

Verizon, AT&T Face ‘High Priority’ EPA Inquiry Over Lead In Telecom Cables

from the whoops-a-daisy dept

Wed, Jan 17th 2024 05:28am - Karl Bode

While the telecom industry did manage to successfully defang U.S. consumer protection regulators for the better part of the last decade, they’re still facing some notable headwinds. Broadband growth has dramatically slowed, cable TV customers are leaving in droves, and while they are getting a ton of new subsidies via the infrastructure bill, a lot of that money is going to very popular new publicly-owned competitors.

But there’s another major worry: a report last July by the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) showed huge swaths of telecom cabling installed years ago was coated in lead, posing significant health concerns. Telecoms like AT&T and Verizon have tried to downplay the issue, which is predicted to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 billion to remedy.

Enter the EPA, which now says it has expanded a “high priority” inquiry into the problem (read: not a very high priority inquiry into the problem) and what the nation’s biggest telecoms are doing about it. For whatever it’s worth, lawmakers like Senator Ed Markey aren’t pleased that telecoms are only just now getting around to remedying the problem decades after it should have been obvious:

“Lead exposure poses serious risks to children, who are particularly vulnerable to its effects, and is associated with chronic pain in adults, and with miscarriage, stillbirth or premature birth during pregnancy,” Markey wrote in his letter. He also noted that lead cables could contaminate drinking water.”

This being the U.S. telecom industry, you can be fairly certain that any meaningful remedy to the problem will take years to materialize, any regulatory penalty for failure to fix the problem in a timely manner will border on the meaningless, and all remediation costs will, inevitably, be passed on to consumers in the form of price hikes on already expensive broadband access.

Filed Under: broadband, cables, drinking water, epa, lead, telecom
Companies: at&t, verizon

Telecom Stocks Plummet After Report Shows Many Cables Lined With Lead

from the comes-around-goes-around dept

Fri, Jul 21st 2023 02:58pm - Karl Bode

While the telecom industry did manage to successfully defang U.S. consumer protection regulators for the better part of the last decade, they’re still facing some notable headwinds. Broadband growth has dramatically slowed, their cable TV customers are leaving in droves, and while they are getting a ton of new subsidies via the infrastructure bill, a lot of that is going to very popular new publicly-owned competitors.

But there’s another major worry: a new report by the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) showed huge swaths of telecom cabling installed years ago was coated in lead, posing significant health concerns. In response, AT&T did was AT&T always does, which was basically pretend that none of it was real:

Based on information shared by The Journal, it appears that certain of their testing methodologies are flawed and one of the companies responsible for the testing is compromised by a conflict of interest.

But the pressure is on to remove and re-install any lead-coated cabling, and the mounting costs of such a project (estimated to be somewhere around $60 billion) pummeled already reeling telecom stocks for most of last week:

The telecom stocks were already having a rough year. Over the past 12 months, including today’s results, AT&T’s stock is down 34.1 percent. Verizon is down 37.4 percent over the past year. Lumen and Frontier are down 84.2 percent and 52.8 percent during the past 12 months, respectively.

There’s some irony here given that the telecom industry has successfully engaged in one of the most successful lobbying campaigns in recent memory. The Trump FCC was basically a puppet for industry, and the Biden FCC has lacked any competent voting majority thanks to both inherent fecklessness and the industry’s assault on the nomination of Gigi Sohn. Lobbying couldn’t conquer reality, though.

With AT&T’s network being the oldest, they likely face the greatest costs. And while consumers will inevitably be the ones to pay for it (either through higher rates or the government bailing AT&T out with taxpayer money), maybe we could instead use some of the money AT&T reportedly stole from the U.S. school system to fund the repairs instead?

Filed Under: dsl, health, lead, networks, phone, public, telecom

Unintended Consequences, Lead And Crime

from the the-world-works-in-bizarre-ways dept

If you haven’t yet, you owe it to yourself to read Kevin Drum’s recent article for Mother Jones about the possible link between crime rates and leaded gasoline. The article makes a rather convincing case that the massive growth, and then subsequent decline, in crime over the last six decades or so was influenced quite strongly by the fact that automobile gasoline had lead — and then went unleaded due to environmental concerns. The article cites numerous studies that all seem to suggest the same thing — and carefully tries to get past the “correlation is not causation” issue by looking at multiple studies that tackle the same question from different angles (different time periods, locations, population types, etc.) to try to eliminate other possible explanations. One of the parts that struck me as most interesting was the data on big cities as compared to other regions:

Like many good theories, the gasoline lead hypothesis helps explain some things we might not have realized even needed explaining. For example, murder rates have always been higher in big cities than in towns and small cities. We’re so used to this that it seems unsurprising, but Nevin points out that it might actually have a surprising explanation—because big cities have lots of cars in a small area, they also had high densities of atmospheric lead during the postwar era. But as lead levels in gasoline decreased, the differences between big and small cities largely went away. And guess what? The difference in murder rates went away too. Today, homicide rates are similar in cities of all sizes. It may be that violent crime isn’t an inevitable consequence of being a big city after all.

The article has not gone entirely without criticism. Drum has distanced himself from the claim of the key researcher he relies on in the piece that 90% of the rise and fall of crime (not 90% of crime) is attributable to lead, suggesting that 50% might be a more reasonable number. Separately, Ronald Bailey has reasonably taken Drum to task for blithely making statements about “blindingly obvious” things concerning IQ and ADHD that turn out to be… not true. When you take those things out of the equation, some of the report relies on “aggressiveness” and “impulsivity,” but as Bailey notes, there is no national data series on aggressiveness or impulsivity. And, having seen way too many “studies” on video games / violent media causing greater “aggressiveness” and “impulsivity,” but always failing to show that those traits actually lead to more crime, it pays to be somewhat skeptical.

That said, the data is very interesting, and certainly worth much more research and better understanding. At the very least, it’s a reminder of our complex ecosystem and economy, where understanding cause and effect is often incredibly complicated, and the end results may be quite surprising. It is all too easy to jump to conclusions about cause and effect (and, yes, we are just as guilty of this as others at times) — but the real world is an impossibly complex mixture of inputs and variables, that rarely succumb to simple explanations that follow the initial “most obvious” rationale.

Filed Under: crime, lead, statistics, unintended consequences