Why lead is still bad for your brain

Summary

Image credit: Ionut Stefan Talking about lead is boring. I would know, I’ve spent quite a bit of time trudging through papers about lead while writing this post and the best opening I could come up with is just how mind-numbingly boring lead is. Sadly, boredom isn’t a good indicator for importance. While the days of enthusiastically throwing lead into whatever we could (from water pipes to gasoline to cosmetics to paints for houses and children’s toys) are over, the lead we’ve pumped into the environment doesn’t give up so easily. And if that wasn’t enough, we’ve still found some use cases to keep it hanging around (why yes, I’m talking about batteries). Ok, but how bad can it really be? The levels of lead are surely not as high anymore, so it’s not really that dangerous, right? Well… short answer: it’s a bit more complicated. The long answer is the rest of the article. What is lead?Effects of lead and mechanisms behind themWhat is there to do? What is lead? Lead is a heavy metal. (Little side note: until the writing of this article, I’ve taken the term “heavy metal” pretty much for granted, because everyone knows what a heavy metal is, right? Right? Well… apparently there’s quite a bit of ambiguity surrounding the term, but lead is one of the few who meets all of the definitions out there. And heavy typically refers to dense and/or less chemically reactive, i.e. not interested in playing well with others.) So lead is a heavy metal and it’s found naturally in the ground. What makes it pretty neat is that it’s both malleable, but also durable and versatile. What makes it less neat is that it’s so malleable, versatile, durable, and toxic. As I mentioned in the beginning, lead has been used in a lot of products. And it’s been used since as far back as Roman times. The problem is that lead is so durable, it basically doesn’t degrade. You see, unlike other fun toxic metals, such as mercury (which can be converted in less toxic forms by bacteria), lead is resistant to che...