Flint Michigan and Trail BC lead poisoning

Real developmental-disability outcomes from lead exposure (Trail from zinc-smelting airborne lead; Flint from drinking water). Used in tension with Tom's view that EPA limits have over-tightened.

When I bought my house, which was finished in 1938 — built during the Depression, took them about five or six years — there was a piece of lead pipe over the laundry sink and I took it out. Most of the lead pipe has been replaced; it's typically copper pipe now. But apparently in Medford, Massachusetts, forty-seven percent of the homes have lead pipe for their service water. It won't corrode for hundreds of years. But now we won't even let people use lead-tin solder on the copper pipes, because of the EPA. Every town will send you with your water bill an annual statement of how much lead and how much arsenic is in your water. As we get more and more precise in our ability to measure the amount of lead, the EPA requirements become lower and lower, because parents think their children are stupid because they're drinking the local water. And I say that's not the reason — it's genetic. It has nothing to do with the amount of lead in the water.