A Big Biden Deal: Get The Lead Out

 Matt Yglesias keeps sending me his posts every morning, because I subscribe to his blog. This morning he attacked the idea of replacing lead pipes as part of Biden's infrastructure plan.

First, let's dismiss the lunatic arguments from the GOP that pipes aren't infrastructure. They are almost the definition of infrastructure. Moving on.

The idea that lead is a silent public health crisis is a legitimate one. One thing I've noticed as a teacher is that students coping with the pandemic just have less thinking ability. It's a concept called "cognitive load," and when a person gets overwhelmed, their brain just functions worse. It's transient, but it could leave huge gaps in this generation of young people. Cognitive load isn't permanent brain damage, but I can observe it in my classroom, and in myself for that matter. We talk about "Covid Brain" in our house when we can't remember things. Everyday actions just have an additional layer of difficulty that impacts our entire brain function.

Lead is much worse than that. It's permanent brain damage that can be treated a bit, but often goes undetected. There was a speech by Sir Ken Robinson that noted that ADHD diagnoses go up as you move across the country. He dismissed this as being an epidemic. I think he's wrong. Population density means more environmental lead - in the air, in the soil, in the pipes, in the walls - and lead absolutely is toxic to thinking processes.

While we are at it, let's throw mercury into the mix, as well as other heavy metal toxins that we pumped into our atmosphere. We live on a planet that we have systematically poisoned for several centuries. As Yglesias notes about lead, we've known for over a century that lead is a neurotoxin, yet we continued to put it into paint, gasoline and water pipes. (This is yet another example of scientific/health knowledge being subverted by the profit motive. Kind of like coal companies and global warming.)

This Scientific American article asks important questions about the idea of an "autism epidemic." The first and most important question is: Is there an autism epidemic? The answer seems to be, no. What we are seeing, though, is a better grasp of learning and cognitive disabilities. Have these gone up or are we just diagnosing them better? That's unclear.

What should be investigated is the degree to which our polluted environment impacts young people's brains. Perhaps two kids are exposed to the same amount of lead or mercury. One has a genetic vulnerability and the other doesn't. Or one was exposed in one precise way and the other was not. One kid will struggle with self-control and cognitive ability and one won't. 

And some idiot will blame it a vaccine, because it's somehow more comforting to believe that a choice action - whether or not to get the vaccine - causes this than just a random throw of the genetic and environmental dice. We are so desperate to think we have control over things, that we create conspiracy theories to explain the random nature of the world.

The reality - in my mostly uninformed opinion - is that the cognitive issues we see in young people are caused by centuries of global indifference to the toxins we pumped into our environment.