Summary
Childhood lead exposure from leaded gasoline caused 151 million additional psychiatric illnesses in the U.S. between 1940 and 2015, according to new research.
Peak exposure occurred for Generation X (1966–1986 births) due to widespread use of leaded gasoline before its 1996 ban.
The study links lead exposure to higher rates of depression, anxiety, ADHD, and altered personality traits, including increased neuroticism and reduced conscientiousness.
Lead pollution also caused a collective loss of 824 million IQ points in Americans.
I mean…yeah. One in my has to look remotely in americas direction to see that. Especially now.
Called it
Nostradamus over here!
As a gen xer I still think this is likely a lowball estimate. But it’s still good to see the numbers. And still depressing to have to point out all the lead pipes still in use. Granted if they’re well maintained they’re “safe”. But seeing “maintenance” in a major population centers in a red state lacking. Knowing the rural areas are far far worse. Well, there’s going to be plenty lead addled millennials and zoomers too. And less will to fix it. 🤐
Yep! All that lead, and we’re full to the tits with microplastics, too!
I think they’re macroplastics when they get put in tits
Absolutely. We don’t even know what Horrors that’s going to cause.
At least there isn’t evidence of microplastics being harmful to humans, but they certainly harm ecology.
My God. We really are speed running “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” aren’t we? I always thought of it more in the sense of political and social decay. But we even have the god-damned lead pipes!
Biden approved an absolute shit ton of money to replace lead service lines across the country.
Can’t wait for Trump to claw that back.
“We’ve decided to replace the flouride in your water with lead”
Yes, we noticed. Latest election being one of examples.
Aviation fuel still contains lead. Not jet fuel but the avgas small private planes use. Pisses me off
Yeah ive gotta fill my plane at work every day with that poison and and then when I test the fuel it gets all over my hand and my skin turns white once it dries (so I wash my hand) but YUCK. Most of the engines can totally run on mogas anyway they just don’t want to because a small percentage cannot and there’s only one fuel bowser.
….Do you not have access to gloves?
Pilot here. I fly those little airplanes. We all want to get rid of the lead very much. We don’t like the environmental damage, we don’t like the lead exposure, and it’s also expensive- the machine that mixes the lead into the gasoline costs millions and the resulting fuel can’t be transported by pipeline as it would contaminate the pipeline. Result is that aviation gas is always expensive.
Problem is, some of the airplane engines actually need the leaded fuel. So avgas available everywhere is 100LL, meaning 100 octane low lead.
There is a lot of effort underway to fix that situation. Probably the most currently advanced is an outfit called GAMI who made a fuel called G100UL, it is made by combining normal high octane gasoline with a series of additives that make it run in any airplane engine (including the ones that need lead). Unfortunately due to some weird legalities regarding it, to legally use it you need to pay GAMI a couple hundred bucks for a sticker. It’s also not widely available yet.
NASCAR only stopped using leaded gas in 2008.
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That’s a small amount of old airplanes. It’s not like there are 250 million 1947 Piper Cubs flying a 100,000+ Km a year.
So the “chemtrails” crowd was not far off then? They just got angry about the wrong type of planes and the wrong type of poison
Yeah my Gen-X childhood hell started making a lot more sense when I realized just how bad the lead problem was back in the day. It also explains the huge spike in graduations literally starting the year after I would have graduated. (I bailed and got a GED easy peasy).
I’m sure I’ve met someone who’s lost 824 million IQ points.
Hol’ up, 1986 is Gen-X now? I thought I was a Millennial. This shit changes all the time.
Eh, seems like it’s a little fuzzy depending on whom you ask. I’d still call you a Millennial and that jives with the Generation X Wikipedia page:
“Researchers and popular media often use the mid-1960s as its starting birth years and the late 1970s as its ending birth years, with the generation being generally defined as people born from 1965 to 1980.”
Generally it’s considered about 1965 to 1980. But nothing is exact like that. Culturally my millennial sibling only 5 years younger had a very similar childhood and the exact same parents. Ultimately generations are societal constructs just like race. And don’t really mean all that much.
XennialLyfe homey
You’re a millennial. A definition I heard was that you were born before 2000, but not an adult. So… you could argue 1980-82
ChatGPT says: The most commonly accepted year range for millennials is 1981 to 1996. However, definitions can vary slightly depending on the source, with some extending the range by a year or two in either direction.
I trust that more than I trust some random writer.
Imagine trusting AI 🤡
Got a source that says 1986? Yeah didn’t think so.
Considering there’s no exact year set in stone & the way LLMs work it’s probably the most accurate answer we have.
With millenials often there’s a split made between the early millenials and later millenials. People born before 1990 will have gone through a lot of early life and education without the internet. Where people born in 1990 and later will have had internet for most their childhood and education. This means the early millenials are a lot like gen-X and the later are much more distinct.
That part saddens me a bit. I’m part of the last generation of people that will ever know what the world was like before the net, without reading about it in a history book. It’s like being the person who was born before Tesla and Edison did their thing, and by the time they were an adult, the cities were lit up like giant inverted chandeliers with strange new loud self-powered vehicles starting to fill the streets.
Why are you sad? That’s an awesome thing to get to see. There were some points in history where you wouldn’t see much innovation in your lifetime but we will see tons.
I wonder what things my kids will see that are similar to this? Maybe I’ll catch the start of whatever it is
It is a wonderful transformation that younger people will never be able to appreciate, but of course there are dark sides. We did also lose valuable qualities related to socialization, imagination, physical activity, attention span
Can’t speak for them, but clearly it will be (already is) our downfall
I’m the same age - you Gen Xers can’t steal me… I had to endure decades of shitty avocado toast references and can’t afford a decent fucking home. I’m millennial to my core!
I like to think a good way to tell if someone is one is asking if they’ve ever heard of or played the original Oregon Trail, or know what Pogs are.
I was early 80s and grew up with those things too, but really I think if your childhood internet experience was “wtf is that” or BBS boards, then that’s the GenX cut-off, whereas millennials got the full WWW/AOL+ experience.
Millennials were the “Information Age” generation, and being a part of that, when there was some thought that free access to information and true knowledge would connect us all and bring us all into a new world… Before that was all completely crushed by corporate/government manipulation… that really feels like the defining aspect of being a millennial to me.
It becomes a far more defining characteristic to me as I see where the world is heading. That’s probably why a lot of us “older” folks are here, escaping enshittification and weaponized social media platforms, searching for some semblance of what we grew up with. It’s making me a bit emotional to be honest… another “millennial” thing i suppose.
Unless you were early eighties baby and introduced to BBS at a remarkably young age like me. Oregon Trail generation FTW.
I tried to resist being lumped in with millennials, meekly clung to “Xennials” for a time, but I’ve accepted my place finally.
Did you buy a detached house before you joined us? If not you’ll probably need to wait until at least 2060 to afford one.
Fortunately I did manage to exploit my then in-between status to purchase a home before covid, but i had to permanently sacrifice avocado toast to do it.
I’ll bring the avo if you’ve got a couch, buddy.
It’s all very arbitrary and stupid.
You’ve … you’ve seen their last election, right?
Yeah they weren’t like “This might be a thing” they were like, this is definitely a thing.
looks at Facebook
Yeeeeeep. Fucking looney toons ovah heah.
I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again (along with many in this thread I’m sure): a large part of our fucked up political culture comes from lead poisoning. But not in a simple single-vector way.
In addition to the obvious neurotoxin effect that lead has and the way it amplifies mental health issues, there’s another vector: the effect that the behavior of lead-poisoned individuals have on the people around them. Especially in the era of social media. And this ripples through society and creates a crescendo of sociological damage.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the incoming administration saw this and added “bring back leaded gasoline” to their anti-woke agenda so they can more easily manipulate future generations.
Well they’re gona stop the chemtrails apparently so why not throw some lead back into the topsoil instead
I 100% agree with you. I’ve worked some jobs for companies with access to large swaths of data and one of the…say…more interesting patterns I saw was lead exposure areas of the US and how that area did when it came to education, voting, welfare program use, and other statistics.
The difference is significant and noticeable by anyone with eyes.
It probably helps if you don’t have lead plated neurons too.
But yeah, just looked it up and I’m kinda surprised. It’s the Midwest and Florida. Like it tracks, but I’m surprised we beat Mississippi in childhood blood lead content
