Are there testing services you’ve used before or would recommend to perform the testing? There does not seem to be a major brand or service provider offering this. Thank you!

Not a direct answer, but there are lead testing kits on Amazon. You mail a tap water sample to a lab. The “kit” is not much more than a vial and prepaid shipping label on a small box.

Yeah it sounds amazing in theory, but none of us have the time to figure that out. It's just way too complicated. It needs to be dumbed down so that you contact one single company, they send a guy over with a bunch of kits and translates it into an easily understandable how-fucked-are-you score, with upsells for improving your score.

Sounds like a business opportunity

This kind of thing exists and is rife with head office pushing iffy practices to boost the detection - e.g. sampling a bigger area than the official measurement equation requires etc.

Lots of problems with ‘meth detection’ companies that over-detect then sell you tens of thousands of dollars of remediation services.

Do not use lead testing kits. They’re a waste of money. The best thing to do would be to find an EPA-licensed lead profession to test your property with an XRF gun. You get a breakdown of every place in your house, inside and out.

As long as people understand what's a safe level of contamination. There was a problem in New Zealand a few years ago when somebody misread a document describing the level of meth residue that should remain after cleaning up a meth lab and as a result, a whole little meth testing industry popped up and people were selling their houses cheap because of very light contamination being detected. Even an elderly lady in a state house was kicked out because her grandson had smoked meth while visiting. Turned out, that threshold was much lower than the actual safe level for the initial contamination and all these people were screwed over.

I had a friend who was employed by one of the dodgy New Zealand testing companies.

Her facebook feed was full of lots of articles that deliberately confused the contamination from household meth labs with contamination from people who just used meth.

Most Americans would still choose not to do this because any knowledge of a positive lead test means that you need to report it when you sell your house which might effect resale value.

The large majority (>90%) of houses built before 1940 have lead paint in them somewhere and lead paint wasn't banned until 1970 in the US so many older houses still have lead paint somewhere

You could have just said "Most Americans are greedy"

Presumably if you care about testing for lead, you'd also care enough to have it dealt with while you are living there.

Is there any reason to care about interior lead paint if it’s under several more recent lead free layers and not chipping off?

Not particularly if it's dry and sealed in, however ..

In a rising damp, wall wicking water scenario the lead may be leached out from the paint and transported to, say, food being grown near house.

The US had long term issues from lead in the water (being ingested) so there's a similar danger here if the lead isn't stable on the wall behind sealing layers.

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For Flint, Michigan [1] (the recent times big news event) and other cities it was lead from pipes:

    Officials failed to apply corrosion inhibitors to the water, which resulted in lead from aging pipes leaching into the water supply, exposing around 100,000 residents to elevated lead levels.

ie. Lead leached by water from a lead source (be that paint, pipes, or gasoline particulate residue)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis

Nope, but some homeowners do not know the dangers of lead dust and can get home renovations done without taking the proper precautions.

Lead and asbestos are like the C programming language. In certain very controlled situations they can be perfectly fine. Only in the real world that rarely ever happens.

What we really need is a government scheme for realtime detection built into phones. There are plenty of research papers, hard to believe it's truly impossible to make a consumer grade Bluetooth mini LIBS or at least a scintillation counter in a phone, or a microscope that can look at dust in the air to find asbestos, etc.

I've even heard of work on realtime virus detection.

There are various Geiger counter apps that work by taping something over the camera such that it's blacked out, and then measuring excitement of the CMOS sensor by gamma rays.

These apps have been found to work but only for gamma, sensitivity isn't great, I have seen it described as an "am I already screwed?" detector app.