They defined these blood lead levels:

* "detectable": ≥1.0 μg/dL

* "elevated": ≥5.0 μg/dL

They found that:

* 50.5% had "detectable" levels (50.4%-50.6% for the 95% CI).

* 1.9% had "elevated" levels (1.8%-1.9% for the 95% CI [wait, how is the reported amount the same as the upper limit of the CI?]).

The paper does start out saying:

> No safe level of exposure to lead has been identified.

Which I believe to be true, though it's not the same as "no level of exposure to lead is safe". I would be interested in what levels are known to be unsafe. Is 1.0 μg/dL known to be unsafe, or just not known to be safe?

It's pretty clear we should be working to reduce lead exposure, especially in children, but it's also true that "detectable amounts" and "harmful" aren't the same thing. The former clearly varies with our technology and the other remains constant (and isn't, afaik, known to be 0).

I'm curious. If there's lead in the water, the air, the soil, the food we eat, is zero even possible? Is there a baseline "side effect of living on Earth" level, even if it's very slight?

The death rate of being human is 100%. Every five minutes there's some new paper or study letting us all know why we should be afraid of something new.

I'm not saying this particular study is necessarily scare-mongering, but good grief is it tiring to see this stuff all day every day, without any scale of risk for context.