NPR:
“Exposure to lead as a child can affect an adult decades later, according to a study out Tuesday that suggests a link between early childhood lead exposure and a dip in a person’s later cognitive ability and socioeconomic status.
Lead in the United States can come from lots of sources: old, peeling paint; contaminated soil; or water that’s passed through lead pipes. Before policies were enacted to get rid of lead in gasoline, it could even come from particles in the fumes that leave car tailpipes.
And when lead gets into a human body, it can mess with brain development, decades of research has shown. “It’s toxic to many parts of the body, but in particular in can accumulate in the bloodstream and pass through the blood brain barrier to reach the brain,” says the study’s first author, Aaron Reuben, a graduate student in clinical psychology at Duke University...
Reuben says, children who experienced higher lead exposures “saw their intellectual abilities decline from their baseline starting point” as time wore on. He adds, “people who saw that decline also experienced downward social mobility.” The children who’d had high lead exposure — defined at the time as more than 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood — were more likely than the other kids to go on to have jobs that required slightly less education and brought in a little less income compared to their parents’ jobs.
In Reuben’s study, every 5 microgram increase in lead concentration in the blood at age 11 corresponded to a drop in IQ of 1.6 points at age 38 — primarily because of a drop in scores on perceptual reasoning and working memory. (Today the health standards for lead are stricter; 5 micrograms per deciliter is considered high exposure, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and no amount of lead is considered safe.)
The dips in IQ and in socioeconomic status were mild. But, Reuben says, “even small changes in IQ had some significant influence on the course that people’s lives took.””
You would have been a genius, instead you are mediocre. You can thank some greedy corporate executives who at the time railed against government regulations.
