Lead In Gas Made People Dumb And Crazy Or Something

This isn’t quite a climate doom article, but, the underlying thread is that Fossil Fuels Are Bad (even though NBC News and Warmists use a lot themselves)

Lead in gasoline tied to over 150 million excess cases of mental health disorders, study suggests

Exposure to lead in gasoline during childhood resulted in many millions of excess cases of psychiatric disorders over the last 75 years, a new study estimates.

Lead was banned from automobile fuel in 1996. The study, published Wednesday in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, looked at its lasting impact in the U.S. by analyzing childhood blood lead levels from 1940 to 2015. According to the findings, the national population experienced an estimated 151 million excess mental health disorders attributable to exposure to lead from car exhaust during children’s early development.

The exposure made generations of Americans more depressed, anxious, inattentive or hyperactive, the study says.

Interesting. But, most lead was taken out of gasoline voluntarily by 1986. For one thing, lead destroyed catalytic converters. The petroleum companies also knew lead was bad, and there was very few leaded gasolines by the mid-1970s in the U.S.. Say, I wonder what the dangers of all these precious metals like lithium in EVs will be?

The researchers — a group from Duke University, Florida State University and the Medical University of South Carolina — found that the exposure also lowered people’s capacity for impulse control and made them more inclined to be neurotic.

Lead-associated mental health and personality differences were most pronounced for people born between 1966 and 1986, according to the study. Of that group, the greatest lead-linked mental illness burden was for Generation Xers born between 1966 and 1970, coinciding with peak use of leaded gasoline in the mid-1960s and mid-1970s.

Horseshit. Gen X is a pretty darned stable generation. I’d suggest that removing lead has created more of a problem with Millennials and GenZ, who seem batguano wackadoodle, always yammering about needing mental health days and being traumatized by having to do simple homework and their jobs.

“Studies like ours today add more evidence that removing lead from our environment and not putting it there in the first place has more benefits than we previously understood,” Reuben said.

In fairness, all that lead was actually bad for people, just like asbestos. But, baby boomers and Gen X are a hell of a lot more mentally stable than the follow on generations.

Reuben, who was the lead author of that study, said the new research “doesn’t create new information about whether lead causes harm, nor do we say this is a study that proves causation — we’re really just taking existing evidence and applying it to the whole U.S. population.”

So, we already knew lead was bad, and have already mostly banned it. So, what was the point of the study?

I wonder, though, what will a study in 20 years will say about the COVID vaccines, masking, and all the Crazy that came with the over-reaction to the Chinese coronavirus? How it stunted growth, made people mental messes, and such?

The post Lead In Gas Made People Dumb And Crazy Or Something appeared first on Pirate’s Cove.