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Comment by ryankask | Hacker News Reader

As an American living in the UK, it's interesting to see the disparity in almost all aspects of the treatment of lead. In the US, for example, there is an abundance of research and activism coupled with laws and a huge abatement/remediation industry. In the UK, however, where there is a large stock of old housing that very likely contains lead paint, pipes, and other products, there is nothing comparable.

Are children in the UK silently suffering from lead poisoning, or "losing IQ points"? I have lead paint in my house and If I took my children to get tested at the GP, I would expect a strange look in response.

Compare this to asbestos, where a survey is always recommended when purchasing an older property in the UK. While I think a lead survey would be suggested in the US if purchasing a pre-1978 property (and is required in some areas when renting to a family with children), I would guess only a handful are done here every year.

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I suspect there is lead pipe in my water supply in London, UK. I got a lab test done in Germany -- I checked the German standards and I believe they mandate the use of the appropriate testing techniques; it seems impossible to get a reliable test done in London. The measured lead concentration was not above the last EU recomended safe level before they decided there was no safe level, but it wasn't much lower than that either.

The agency in London responsible, Thames Water, will replace any lead pipe in the public network leading to your building if you agree to replace any lead pipe on your property within 3 months.

But I live in a "leasehold" flat (common in London). So "you" for the purposes of that agreement would be not me but the "freeholder", who is responsible for building maintenance. To get them to do anything, I have to go to a lot of effort to get action out of the "management company" hired by the freeholder (and probably then be blamed by other leaseholders -- most of whom don't live here -- for costing them money to replace the pipe). I followed up with them maybe four times before giving up. I'm not the customer of the freeholder or of the management company. Reading up on the impact on adults (thought to be low compared to the impact on kids), I decided to just run my tap for a few minutes every day and store water to drink for that day (wasting lots of water in the process). I notified the other residents, some of whom have children, suggesting I could help take it further if others helped out. Nobody responded.

The official guidance is to not test, since the test wasn't very good, the number of kids with genuine issues is low (so high false negative rate) and the treatments being dangerous if you don't actually have the problem.

It should be relatively easy to get someone to test your water though, and get that sorted if there's an issue found.

The intersection of "your neighborhood has lots of lead in it" and "you flunked an inaccurate test" probably has a lot fewer false positives in it, right? You were exposed to lead. You might have lead poisoning, we can't be certain, but you're categorically in danger of getting it, based on environment and/or behaviors.

Note, I'm talking about UK guidance. Possibly they're missing some cases, but they do have a program of nationwide testing to monitor if there's any issues and the NHS has a direct financial incentive to report it and get it fixed via prevention if it's an issue.

In France lead paint completely disappeared.

But the main driver of criminal behaviour and loss of IQ is lead gasoline you breath all day long anyway and that's nearly gone too. I think Algeria is finally removing it this year, it was one of the last country.

Algeria ended it this summer.[0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/30/leaded-p...

I'm curious as to if Cuba still uses leaded gasoline, as quite a few years ago I spent a night in Havana during a cruise and some sight-seeing around the old city.

I knew that the exhaust of vehicles smelled different from the U.S., or even busy cities in the U.S.

Cuba might not have a choice, thanks to US sanctions.

> In the UK, however, where there is a large stock of old housing

note that the article mentions Rhode Island. The US northeast is full of a lot of very old houses, and is a lot "closer" to the UK in terms of age of average house than the US western states.

Basically all older houses in the Northeast US--which as you say is many of them--have lead paint to greater or lesser degrees. (As well as elsewhere of course. It's just that the average age in the Northeast tends to be older.) If you get new windows installed for example, the installers just assume they have to take lead mitigation efforts. There's really not much you can do about it other than covering it up with new paint.

I think the biggest issues is probably lead piping. Lead in paint only becomes a problem when it starts chipping and chalking. It should still be removed eventually however.

Lead piping, galvanized steel piping with lead service lines, lead paint, your actual back yard if you live in an area that was densely populated during the leaded gasoline era, the kitschy old toys at grandma and grandpas house... the biggest issue can be just about anything, depending on your specific living environment.

Lead plumbing should absolutely be removed where its found. Lead paint... Is a different story. As long as its not chipping or easily accessible it's not really that much of a problem.

But presumably if somebody starts sands it down, people can get exposed to very high levels.

The boy's story in the article involves lead paint.

I'm doubtful that painters here in the UK take great care over it. And from what I've read, it may be the costs fall heavily on kids and not so much adults.

As a landlord in the US I have to sign a lead paint disclosure every year for my tenants stating I have no knowledge of lead paint on the property. This may be state specific though.

I got one of those papers from my landlord. It's a beautiful document that I can, at best, use as toilet paper.

My landlord has no knowledge of any of the work that was done on the building, prior to him buying it. The previous managers did not keep meticulous records.

Is there lead paint on the property? Maybe. Maybe not. My landlord not knowing about it doesn't change anything in this equation.

If the property is older than the mid-1970s or so, it likely has lead paint. (It was banned in the US in 1978 but I don't know how widespread its use was in the years leading up to the ban.)

Related New Jersey had an odd requirement of repainting between tenants of apartments to try to remediate it. (Cynically kickbacks seem more likely given a proper stripping would fix it more permanently.)

Landlords need to paint every few years. The better ones are painting between tenants anyway. Paint is cheap, and covers a lot of ugly (most of it harmless ugly). Thus I doubt the state got much push back. Doing a proper lead mitigation would be expensive.

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