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A comment on High schoolers create filter to remove lead in water. Parent comment

Re:High schoolers create filter to remove lead in water by refurb on Friday April 01, 2022 @03:18AM (#30875923)
For all the concern about Flint and lead in the water, I was shocked to learned that despite lead levels in the water increasing, lead blood levels in children were still much lower than a decade earlier. They did increase, but they were still less than half the level in 2006.

The study, which appears in the Journal of Pediatrics, found a decrease in Flint childhood blood lead levels, from 2.33 micrograms per deciliter in 2006 to 1.15 micrograms per deciliter in 2016 — a historic low for the city. The mean blood lead level in 2015 during the height of the water crisis was 1.3 micrograms per deciliter, up from 1.19 in 2014 before the water source switch.

https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(17)31758-4/fulltext

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Re:High schoolers create filter to remove lead in water by eppsilon on Friday April 01, 2022 @12:58PM (#30880461)
Could that be due to the long decline of blood lead levels after the phase-out of unleaded gasoline?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7969125/#t2

Incredible that lead in the water had such a relatively small effect, though.

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Re:High schoolers create filter to remove lead in water by maxerickson on Friday April 01, 2022 @03:56PM (#30882604)
People were complaining to the city council about water quality 8 months after the switch to the water source that caused high water lead levels (and were likely concerned well before that).

The lead isn't an immediate problem if the water chemistry is correctly maintained, the pipes develop scale and there isn't a lot of material being dissolved into the water. The presence of lead infrastructure of course requires that the water chemistry be correctly maintained so that it does not disturb the pipe scale.

So it can be the case that the total exposure from the problem was somewhat limited.

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Re:High schoolers create filter to remove lead in water by refurb on Friday April 01, 2022 @10:29PM (#30885390)
This is blood lead levels in children, so it more likely exposure at home through things like lead paint.
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