I'm concerned about everyone. When you start getting lead into corn and wheat, it gets into flour and bread and pasta, and before long, everyone has eaten some.
Sure - some have eaten more, and others less. But everyone has been impacted. Half of the US population has blood lead levels above the CDC 'safe' level.
> Half of the US population has blood lead levels above the CDC 'safe' level.
That's a bogus statistic. I went to look up what you could be talking about, and it appears to be pretty shoddy alarmism, not on your part but poorly or shadily written reports. (disclaimer/reassurance: Lead is bad for us, and heavy metal exposures are cumulative over a lifetime, so the lower the better, and we should keep lowering.) But what you quoted implies that we are not succeeding quickly enough, and from things I looked at, that is not a conclusion that can be drawn.
I didn't spend a lot of time on it, but just from a few headlines and an abstract, it's clear that the lead levels under consideration have been lowered recently (and for what I'm about to say, undoubtedly previously lowered other times), and are not toxicity levels but more like "hey, there's lead in this neighborhood". And the lead exposures they are talking about are "retroactively" encompassing the elderly who were exposed as children before the new levels (and unleaded gas) were a thing.
So, they're saying "Among the entire population, half of people have previously received during childhood lead exposures when we didn't have current standards that we would now consider to be, not even unsafe, but where geographically we should focus our attention looking at the sources."
2021, CDC updated the blood lead reference value (BLRV) from 5.0 μg/dL to 3.5 μg/dL. A BLRV is intended to identify children with higher levels of lead in their blood compared with levels in most children... It is not a health-based standard or a toxicity threshold... should be used as a guide to 1) help determine whether medical or environmental follow-up are recommended and 2) prioritize communities with the most need for primary prevention of exposure. .. BLRV is a population-based measurement that now indicates that 2.5% of U.S. children aged 1–5 years have BLLs at or above 3.5 μg/dL.
Considerable effort is expended to protect today's children from lead exposure, but there is little evidence on the harms past lead exposures continue to hold for yesterday's children, who are victims of what we term legacy lead exposures. We estimate that over 170 million Americans alive today were exposed to high-lead levels in early childhood, several million of whom were exposed to five-plus times the current reference level [which is not a health or toxicity level]. Our estimates allow future work to plan for the health needs of these Americans and to inform estimation of the true contributions of lead exposure to population health. We estimate population-level effects on IQ loss and find that lead is responsible for the loss of 824,097,690 IQ points as of 2015.
...and you can't add IQ points like that, most especially if you are part of the substantial segment of the population that says that IQ is a bogus measurement, a segment that heavily overlaps with environmentalism.
While the effects of lead compound over a lifetime, the measured figure is blood lead levels, which will drop to zero if you stop consuming lead, with a half life of 28 days.
Therefore, the measurements made in 2023 mostly reflect lead actually consumed by humans in 2023.
except the sentence I quoted from the report says it's talking about previous exposure in childhood. The original point I was responding to say half the population; children are less than a quarter of the population.
"...yesterday's children, who are victims of what we term legacy lead exposures. We estimate that over 170 million Americans alive today were exposed to high-lead levels in early childhood, several million of whom were exposed to five-plus times the current reference level"
Sure - some have eaten more, and others less. But everyone has been impacted. Half of the US population has blood lead levels above the CDC 'safe' level.