Lead Exposure?

[diana]

Check out this link. http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/n27405490-lead-crime/

Notice that the article says that people get a second dose of lead as they age and their thinning bones release stored lead into their system. Then remember that Dennis Rader stopped and remained quiescent for many years, resuming around age 60.

[caz]

Hi Diana,

I immediately wondered about the gender issue here (as usual) before checking out your link. And sure enough I find them saying that 'men were far more affected than women'. Well why am I not surprised?

We already know that violent crime rates are much higher for men than they are for women, due to a range of factors that have nothing to do with exposure to lead. What worries me here is that poison is poison and brain damage is brain damage and I'm not convinced that female brains are any less vulnerable to lead than male brains, given equal exposure. But if the study set out to suggest that exposure to lead may be a direct cause of violent crime (competing with anger and resentment due to bad housing conditions, poverty, rotten parenting and so on and so forth), it doesn't help if the females didn't play ball and failed to show a corresponding increase in their own violent crime rates compared with women in more lead-free environments.

Are they really claiming that lead does far more damage to male brain cells than female brain cells? Or that the damage is the same but the resulting increase in violent tendencies is, for some reason yet to be ascertained, far greater in males than in females? Do the females just eat far more chocolate instead, or become far more bitchy? I think we need to know.

I would be happier with this suggested link to violent crime if the indications were that lead damage produced the same percentage increase in violence for both sexes, while acknowledging that male violence rates are going to be higher overall for other, unrelated reasons. But even then, it would be difficult to strip away all the other potential factors like poverty etc to reach a conclusion that, by way of example, families living in lead-lined luxury will produce more violent criminals than families living in lead-free luxury.

Love,

Caz
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[caz]

Hi Diana,

Another example of what I'm getting at is this: it was reported the other week (I heard it on the radio so I can't quote directly I'm afraid) that women who used their mobile phones a lot while pregnant were found to produce children with more learning/behavioural difficulties than women who didn't. The suggestion was that the phones themselves may be harmful to the unborn child.

I couldn't help but smile at the thought of any child not going on to have some degree of learning or behavioural difficulty if its mother is constantly going "no, yeah, whatever, I'm on the bus, like you know" into a small metal object clamped to her ear.

Love,

Caz
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