Lead: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Let's let the most dangerous thing be in the name of Led Zeppelin and I'll remind you that the other thing was Zeppelin. Now we have heard a lot about

lead

over the

last

year due to the horrible events in Flint, Michigan. Flint's tap water had dangerous levels of

lead

. the state knew about it and did nothing there are 200 children under six years old in Flint with elevated blood levels 9,000 children have been exposed yes, Flint has become a city whose name alone evokes disasters like Benghazi or Waco or Smurf Village never forget never forget What happened there, never forget Flint was a perfect storm of incompetence from start to finish and the crisis began when the city changed water sources, a decision that was commemorated in this way.

It's a little strange to see people make a toast because they're essentially drinking poison, yeah, under those. circumstances you would normally expect to hear something like I will see you all in hell or the mothership is coming and soon we will all ascend that new water source corroded the city pipes and the leaching led to drinking water and with all the red tape The politicians involved in the fury of the group in Washington they were lining up to express their outrage because we have children who have been harmed and yet we sit here wrong about the words that the mayor cannot blame on the safety and well-being of our citizens no it is. a republican or a democrat or an independent issue is a human issue, we are not a third world country where there are a hundred thousand people who are poisoned for long periods of time, that is true, because there is only one poison that thousands of Americans should consume and that's Mountain Dew Code Red Holy Sh, the most delicious way to get Reds poisoning, which is horrible, that's why we're all worried about lead in Flint now, which is great, unfortunately the problem isn't just in Flint.

A USA Today Network report found lead contamination. in nearly 2000 additional water systems spanning all 50 states and we can't just act like it's not there the way we all pretend the public pool doesn't have a 3% kid you're in, by the way, that's generous and if you're thinking about it, we should just rip out all the lead pipes in the country, it's not as easy as there are an estimated seven point three million lead service lines across the country and we don't even know where many of them are. We made a partial solution that might increase rather than decrease lead in the water, but perhaps more importantly, even if we replaced all the lead pipes, that still wouldn't stop lead poisoning, as they reassuringly put it. the leading activists: kids are not going to be poisoned by a water fountain at their school they are not going to be poisoned by the paint on their houses okay I like how that starts out sounding reassuring and will end up even more terrified it's like saying look , that boa constrictor isn't going to bite you, it's No, it's just not going to crush you to death with its body and then swallow you whole because that's what it does, but she's right, the biggest lead poisoning threat to children It does not come from water, but from ingesting lead paint dust.

There are an estimated 2.1 million homes nationwide that contain enough lead dust that is dangerous to a child under six years old, and the CDC estimates that more than half a million children have elevated levels of lead in their blood and That's terrible, women are almost as much scourges in the homes of small children as the frozen ones. merchandise Why do you need three Olaf and one Elsa Mackenzie singer let it go hashtag let it go if you're thinking at this point what's cool how important is a little LED dust anyway it's a big deal how powerful is LED a child can be poisoned with just 10 milligrams of pure lead to give you an idea of ​​how small amount this tablespoon contains around four thousand milligrams today we know that just ingesting small amounts of lead dust can cause brain damage and even death okay first maybe don't say death in that happy tone of voice over a baby photo, but second, in its truth that there is no safe level of lead, it is one of those things so dangerous that you shouldn't even let a little bit of it inside you, like heroin or Jeremy Piven, even low-level exposure can cause irreversible damage like lower IQ, antisocial behavior, and reduced attention spans, and the dangers are so serious that twenty years ago Sesame Street even produced a video to teach children. how to deal with lead in your homes, I've had it, who do you think you are?

Anyway, the leading police are nearby, but as the police songs play, the possibility of being poisoned by lead is even less terrifying than every breath you take, every breath you take, you'll be looking at me, that's a crime, I you're stalking Gordon you're a stalker that video was made 20 years ago and it's enough to make you wonder if lead paint is so dangerous why is it still there? much of it in homes where children live and that's a good question, many countries around the world banned the use of lead paint in the 1920s, so we knew it was dangerous, but instead of joining them, the United States decided put LEDs basically everywhere. natural element, not Meryl Streep's Oscar speech and also if we assign personality traits to metals, why stop with the humble lead?

How about passionate zinc, free-spirited copper, and extremely racist tin? It was safe to publish things like this coloring book that invited you to the Dutch boys' LED party, which sounds like the worst sex club in all of Amsterdam, and even when the government finally got serious about banning LEDs in the '70s and 80, the LED industry did not decline. without a ridiculous fight here is the head of an industry-led trade group rejecting evidence that the leadership was dangerous. The fact of the matter is that if you look at a total national profile, we have never been healthier, we have never lived longer, there must be something we are doing right which is basically saying it can't be bad, I turned out okay, which is the number one argument of people who didn't turn out well, it's like when your uncle says, hey, I had my first beer at 10:00 and it turned out fine, but your uncle Stu did it because your dinner

last

night consisted of 23 croutons dipped in glaze. and that didn't result in good behavior, make a change, man, and by the way, there was already a lot of hard evidence showing that childhood exposure was harmful in large part to a study done by this man, Dr.

Herbert Needleman in late From the 1970s, Dr. Needleman studied the baby teeth of healthy schoolchildren in two Boston suburbs. When we analyzed the data, we found that children who had mountain teeth but had never been identified as having lead problems with lower IQ scores had poor language function and poor attention. That's right, it's time for you kids to know that there is no such thing as the Tooth Fairy, the Dr. removed all your baby teeth. Herbert Needleman, we told you about the fairy because we knew that would scare you, but you should thank that man because thanks to studies like his, the United States began regulating and removing lead from our environment in the 1970s, which which resulted in a graph of lead levels in the children's blood.

In this country that looks like this now lead paint was banned here and leaded gasoline was phased out everywhere here, so getting rid of lead in paint and gas was a huge public health victory. You know that 18-year-old intern in your office thinks? He is so smart, probably because he was born after the main US epidemic. You're lucky with the soybeans, but now he go get my coffee, but even though we drastically reduced the number of new permits we put into the world, we were still. We were left with all the lead that was already in our pipes and in our walls, and while we all agreed it was a problem, the cost of getting rid of it all was shockingly high.

In 2000, the estimated cost for testing and The old housing stock nationwide was sixteen point six billion dollars a year for the next decade, which is the kind of figure that turns the government into parents with a sick family dog, Hey, I know we said we'd do anything to make this better, but we just got an estimate from the vet and do you know the name Doggy Heaven? Every meal is hot dogs, don't you think Bandit would like to go live there? I know, I know and look, no one expected the government to foot that entire bill.

The same report even made an estimate of what it would cost if the government used interim controls like sealing lead paint or periodic cleanings and only did so in homes where low-income families lived, and that cost would be just two hundred and thirty million dollars. per year, which sounded lower and therefore better, we have unfortunately and surprisingly never funded at that level, for example, the major program to reduce lead paint in housing, the lead hazard control program of HUD has never received allocated funds above 176 million; has been steadily declining since 2003. and this year we have allocated only one hundred and ten million dollars, which is a little more than Americans spent to go see a movie that, by the way, the New York Post described to us as funny as lead poison.

It's amazing and look at that reduction. It's by no means because we're done removing lead from homes because remember there are still millions of homes with lead paint hazards and according to Heart they were only able to fund about half of the lead abatement grant applications that they received last year, which means that many Americans still live in homes with LEDs and, unfortunately, they are often the group that can least do anything about it. People from lower socioeconomic levels move into older, less well-kept homes where there may be absentee landlords and, as a result, lead paint is more likely to have not been removed from the walls, of course, and if found in In that situation, you probably won't be able to look for a new apartment, which is why most people with lead problems are stuck. homes they can't leave doing everything they can to avoid danger, which may sound familiar because it's the plot of every horror movie ever made and the crazy thing is that while LED reduction is expensive, it's profitable, so For example, some studies show a correlation between decreasing LED levels. and a decrease in crime, and when you combine that with lower medical bills and increased economic activity, one study found that every dollar spent controlling lead paint hazards would generate at least seventeen dollars in social benefits, which is great, although cost savings still rank high.

A distant third on my list of reasons not to poison children, number one and second are still poison and your children, and you would think our members of Congress would agree to do more to combat lead poisoning, after all, they remember how angry they were. about all those children that were poisoned in Flint, right, we have children that have been harmed, it is a human problem, it is an American problem that affects the lives of Americans, we are not a third world country where there are a hundred thousand people who are poisoned poisoned, they seem so concerned about who's doing what, but that's what makes it so frustrating that last year all those men voted for a bill that would have reduced the already low funding for the programs Hoglund reduction by thirty-five million dollars. which is equivalent to a thirty-two percent cut and the truth is that if the funding is cut in that way many more children could be poisoned now the good news is that those cuts were not made, the bad news is that the funding remained stable and, by the way, The other two major agencies working on LEED-related issues have also had funding issues in recent years, which doesn't make sense because I thought poisoning children was something we were all justifiably outraged about. for this problem that was obvious enough 20 years ago that Sesame Street felt the need to address it and since we still have this problem, it's clearly time to address it again.

I can't believe it's been two decades since Sesame Street taught kids how to avoid lead dust. "You two don't look like you." I've aged a day oh very good wow they both look great but unfortunately I'm here to say that many places still contain lead paint well that's a good question we should worry more than we currently do to spendenough money. holding it in, oh, that's good, how much do you have there? Elmo, how much is okay? That's a start, no, no, Elmo, you didn't, you actually didn't because we're probably going to need a lot more of that money. hundreds of millions of dollars every year ma'am we really don't have time for that but the problem here is that people are worried that lead is too expensive a problem to fix that's ridiculous how can anyone say it's too expensive?

If you are aware that, according to a study by Environmental Health Perspectives, every dollar we spend on controlling lead paint hazards produces returns of at least seventy to one. Wow, that's a surprising level of economic knowledge coming from someone who lives in a trash can, scanning is rent controlled I've had it since the 60's okay no I know it's profitable but people just aren't willing To do it. I guess it seems too hard, it doesn't make sense Elmo, things tend to get done if you just decide you want to do them, can you think of another example where that's true?

See, you just have to have a personal interest in the outcome and you'd be surprised what you can do. Scratch it, grab your books, guess my trash can is messy, people stop and take a good look, that's, as expected, negative, Oscar, but you know, it's actually a fair representation of our institutional problems, so there you have it, you mean, I helped you make your point, yes, Oscar, you actually made lettuce, they're all around us. our pipes, our walls and our hair, we should do more to contain it, but first we all have to worry that's our show thank you sir