Scientist taught world to get the lead out (CNN)

[eppur_se_muova]

By David S. Martin, CNN Senior Medical Producer
May 13, 2010 10:35 a.m. EDT

New York (CNN) -- As a young doctor with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Phillip Landrigan's job was to chase down epidemics. He'd gone after measles in the Southwest and smallpox in Nigeria.

Then the CDC sent him to Texas for a lead poisoning epidemic.
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This new type of poisoning became known as "subclinical" toxicity because the effects were never severe enough to warrant a trip to the doctor.
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Since then, the percentage of children aged 1 to 5 with what the CDC considers dangerously high levels of lead in their blood has declined from 77.8 percent to 1.6 percent, according to the most recent figures available.
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Landrigan sees the story of lead as a cautionary tale, and he's critical of the current federal law governing toxic substances, which does not require testing to show a chemical is safe before it's put into consumer products.
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more: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/05/13/lead.poisoning.landrigan/index.html?hpt=Sbin

[awoke_in_2003]

1. And Jimmy Page

taught us how to get the Led out :) Seriously, as we buy more and more garbage from China, these numbers will start climbing.

[Igel]

2. Yet not his main fear.

Anxiety, terror, worry.

It's that we consume thousands of different chemicals each day. And most haven't been tested a dozen different ways to make sure they don't trigger cancer, autism, diabetes, brittle hair, eczema, or any of a hundred other ailments. In humans, fish, toads, birds, reptiles, and molluscs.

I mean, think about it! 50,000 chemicals, a dozen tests each for 100 problems on 3000 species.

That's 1.8x10^11 tests. 180,000,000,000. And they all need to be run before he can feel safe.

At $20k each, that's $3,600,000,000,000,000. $3600 trillion. Not counting having to redo tests because of problems in methodology or interpretation, leading to conferences on the role of such-and-such a compound on species in a given genus, and whether the tests differ for males and females, for young, mechanisms of concentrations and whether having 38% of the animals' diet be the compound in question, never more than a few ppm in the environment, is good enough--perhaps 76% would be better.

Now *that* is a NSF budget to dream of, not that it all has to be budged immediately. Heck, a few trillion will do. For now. And with that he can finally feel financially and academically secure, since so many of those will require PhD research, and that requires PIs, and new labs, and coordinating authorities and committees and conferences. All doing God's work--for the common good, of course. Then, since it's so important, those doing the testing need to be given the authority and power to say what action needs to be taken to control industry and private lives to keep us safe.

My new word. They want to be cockspuds. Sadly, there's at least one hit in Google for the word so my neologism isn't absolutely neos.