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Comment by quickslowdown | Hacker News Reader

Still? You're still skeptical, after all these decades of research & being able to draw direct, 1:1 lines between lead exposure and the health issues it causes?

There's plenty of room for debate on how to fix this problem. The debate on if it's a problem has been dead for decades, if not centuries.

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Lead poisoning was written about in Roman times, so you could argue that it's millennia of research. (There's a theory that the fall of the Roman empire was due to lead poisoning - likely from lead-lined aqueducts). However, after the Romans, it wasn't picked up again until the 17th century, so quite plausibly "centuries" of research.

Of course, it used to be relatively easy to avoid lead poisoning (e.g. not using it for water pipes) until we started to pump lots of it into the air around the 1950s.

The Romans didn't need to get it from the water, they directly used it as a flavoring called "sapa." Apparently it was one of the first artificial sweeteners and is actually pretty delicious.

No idea if that's true, but I've heard that's also why the absurd (and terrifying) seeming "children eating paint chips containing lead" is an actual occurrence. Because those lead chips taste sweet.

I didn't know about this, so had a quick look. It seems like they didn't deliberately add it, but boiled the grape syrup in lead containers which leached the lead into the sapa. However, copper cookware was more common, so it's likely that lead aqueducts probably caused more lead poisoning than the sapa. (Sapa is the name for the grape must reduction which may or may not contain lead depending on how they made it).

I only have a vague memory from school, but I believe that we were taught it was not only deliberate (the lead made it taste sweet whereas copper reacted with the acids and made it bitter) but that they would sometimes dry it to make a sort of crystalline salt that was basically concentrated lead acetate and sprinkle it on food.

Yumm - delicious lead poisoning!

There's evidence that the educated were aware of lead being poisonous back then, but the chances are that most of the population wouldn't have known. Reading some more, it seems like the lead pipes probably weren't a big problem as calcium carbonate would form over most of the lead surface and as the water was flowing, it wouldn't pick up too much lead. The lead containers though would be more of a problem.

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