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Jeff Rigsby's avatar

Dr. Evans,

The LeadPollution.org website gives Afghanistan's average blood lead level as 14.2 μg/dL, which is astonishingly high. But I can't trace the source of this figure.

It's attributed to IHME, but the IHME appendix on lead exposure doesn't give references for individual country studies:

https://www.healthdata.org/gbd/methods-appendices-2021/lead-exposure

And when I filter the GHDX lead exposure database for "Afghanistan", nothing comes up:

https://ghdx.healthdata.org/keyword/lead-exposure

Am I doing something wrong here? This seems like something that needs to be urgently verified.

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Jeremy Ney's avatar

Can you explain a bit more about the new paper by Ludovica Gazze, Claudia Persico and Sandra Spirovska and the role that lead plays on non-affected children? I'm not sure if the chart was showing that or this was deeper in the paper

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QuirkyLlama's avatar

The research on lead is strongly confounded. I found Cremieux’s post on this very convincing. You have to believe some crazy things to square research done in 70s with today’s findings… or you can model it as confounding mixed with P-hacking.

https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/who-gets-exposed-to-lead

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Macario Schettino's avatar

My niece, Maria José Talayero, has been working in the relationship between lead poisoning and violence… I’ll try to find an adequate reference, and send it to you…

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