The water contamination crisis in Flint, MI has brought attention to the dangers of lead exposure and aging infrastructure. The problems in Flint will be expensive to fix, but many people are not aware of other "low hanging fruit" in this area. For example, aviation fuel is still leaded, and the national estimate of lead emissions from the consumption of leaded AvGas was 483 tons in 2011, according to the EPA's National Emissions Inventory [0]. Furthermore, the same NEI data shows airports as the top source of lead emissions in 42 states (according to 2011 NEI data).<p>Leaded aviation fuel is used by planes which use internal combustion engines instead of cleaner, more powerful, and more expensive jet engines. Most of these small planes are for personal use.<p>I think the costs of lead abatement should be included in the price of AvGas, or its use should be discontinued entirely.<p>[0] U.S. EPA. Calculating Piston-Engine Aircraft Airport Inventories for Lead for the 2011 National Emissions Inventory. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA-420-B-13-040, 2013. Page 5
I make sure my own children do things like wash their hands before eating to limit their lead exposure, but I've also been reading up on this issue and keep finding this sort of equivocation:<p><i>This does not mean that children at this level are poisoned,” Dietrich says. “There are very few studies of low-level lead exposure, but there is nothing in the data that suggests that children will have negative impacts of short-term low-level exposure” over their lives. In fact, he notes, the 5 μg/dL figure was set because 97.5 percent of young children fall below it, not because blood lead levels at that threshold result in permanent harm</i><p><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-brains-of-flint-s-children-imperiled-by-lead-could-still-escape-damage/" rel="nofollow">https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-brains-of-fli...</a><p>The evidence about low-level lead exposure and IQ seems far from definitive, and seems (to my amateur eye) to be full of unadjusted confounding, but I could be missing something.
The dumb thought rolling around my head is, "Why? They can't even meet the current limits!"<p>It worries me when regulators focus on moving the bar than meeting the bar. Irrespective of whether the limit is right or not.
Honest question for anyone with knowledge about lead and health: I just moved into an apartment that the city has cited for lead-based paint. How soon will I die?<p>I asked the landlord, and he said don't worry about it (of course). He said the risk is mainly for children, and that the lead is only kicked up when the paint is scraped during remodeling or whatever.
This is one of those reasons I decide to drink from water bottles.<p>Yes, there may be traces of antimony in it, but tap water, usually well controlled at the reservoire, presents too high a risk of exposure to various metals and bioforms due to decaying infrastructure.