100% accurate - Empirical Evidence ONLY - LEAD poisoning symptoms POLL.

Please like if you have ever handled LEAD or any LEAD(ed) products and then DIDN'T wash your hands...  AND you have EVER forgotten anything OR been irritable.

Examples of LEAD (based) products include:

1. Solder
2. Fishing weights
3. Some old paints
4. Pencils ( I'm pretty sure this is the wrong "kind of lead", but just to be safe, go ahead and include this.
5. Lead, the element (science guys or labtechs, or Alchemists)
6. Bullets
7. Old style Gasoline (before all this unleaded stuff)
8. SOME rock music prominent in the 70's... I think they still were rocking into the 80's -90's. "Stairway" was one of the first songs I leaned to play...
9.  If you tend to "Stomp on the gas, your foot may be infected... go ahead and like...
10. Anything "heavy" It probably has lead in it.

jwhmca said:

Please like if you have ever handled LEAD or any LEAD(ed) products and then DIDN't wash your hands...  AND you have EVER forgotten anything OR been irritable.

Examples of LEAD (based) products include:

1. Solder

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If worried they may lead free solder

2. Fishing weights

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I suspect modern stuff is lead free

3. Some old paints

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Yellow was notoriously based on lead pigment.

4. Pencils ( I'm pretty sure this is the wrong "kind of lead", but just to be safe, go ahead and include this.

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I don't think I've ever seen a lead pencil that actually used lead.. they use graphite (carbon) AFAIK. While lots of old pencils were painted yellow so chewing on them might not be great.

5. Lead, the element (science guys or labtechs, or Alchemists)

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yup

6. Bullets

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full metal jacket cuts down on lead exposure, until you are shot and then you have larger issues.

7. Old style Gasoline (before all this unleaded stuff)

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not to mention ugly ethanol.

8. SOME rock music prominent in the 70's... I think they still were rocking into the 80's -90's. "Stairway" was one of the first songs I leaned to play...

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That was Led not Lead

9.  If you tend to "Stomp on the gas, your foot may be infected... go ahead and like...
10. Anything "heavy" It probably has lead in it.

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Car batteries use lots of lead, but unless you work in recycling the batteries you should be OK.

I have a bad habit of stripping wire insulation with my teeth.. if the wire was tinned, that could cause me to ingest lead from solder on the tinned wire, but most wire these days is not tinned inside the insulation...

A lifetime of stripping wires that way may explain my CRS condition  (Can't Remember S____ stuff)

Lead is more injurious to very young kids, who also have the bad habit of putting everything in their mouth... Lead based paints in very old buildings could be a concern.

JR

JohnRoberts said:

I have a bad habit of stripping wire insulation with my teeth.. if the wire was tinned, that could cause me to ingest lead from solder on the tinned wire, but most wire these days is not tinned inside the insulation...

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I have a bad habit of holding solder in the my mouth  :-\

Just inherited a big roll of some unidentified solder, and after working with it for two days, I developed a rash around the side of my mouth (right hand side where I hold it)

Nasty...yes. At least it motivated me to break that bad habit.

Gustav

Your bad habit seems worse than mine... you win... ;D ;D

I have developed a chop stix like ability to hold and manipulate both the solder and the wire or component I want to solder with only one hand, while holding the iron with my other hand.

JR

I wonder about this too - anyone ever had a blood test? It's an easy test from what I understand.

Anyone else concerned about all the plastic things associated with this sport?  I highly doubt they're PBA-free.
My mouth is the perfect container for zip ties and wires with delicious coatings.

geoff004 said:

Anyone else concerned about all the plastic things associated with this sport?  I highly doubt they're PBA-free.
My mouth is the perfect container for zip ties and wires with delicious coatings.

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I cook large batch meals, then freeze and re-heat in the microwave (or eat them cold).

Several years ago I purchased Pyrex freezer containers to use instead of plastic. I do not see any grave stones in my local cemetery that claim they were killed by PBA, but it is not expensive to avoid sticking them in the microwave holding my meals.. Just say pyrex.

JR

> Yellow was notoriously based on lead pigment.

The BEST outdoor paint was White Lead in oil.



'Medieval texts warned of the danger of "apoplexy, epilepsy, and paralysis" from working with lead white.'

Those test-stick that turn pink when they touch lead paint? My old porch columns turned them RED instantly. (We took them out very carefully.)

Chrome Yellow is lead(II) chromate (PbCrO4). Traditional US school-bus color, but it darkens over time, so they switched to a blend of Cadmium (yum!) pigments, which oddly are less toxic than Lead.

My grandmother had one of the very first polyethylene bowls, tinted with Uranium. (A uncle was involved in PE development and kept one of the test items.)

> a lead pencil that actually used lead

Before careful chemical analysis, the very best graphite (one mine in England) was thought to be "black lead". When that graphite was mined-out, or you needed good-if-faint marks on damp paper, a Silver stylus was used. (If you are curious, there is a whole book about the pencil.)

There's a very viable hypothesis that lead was behind part of the crime wave that peaked in the late 80s / early 90s:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/07/violent-crime-lead-poisoning-british-export
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/04/criminologist-takes-lead-crime-hypothesis
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/02/lead-and-crime-brennan-center-weighs

living sounds said:

There's a very viable hypothesis that lead was behind part of the crime wave that peaked in the late 80s / early 90s:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/07/violent-crime-lead-poisoning-british-export
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/04/criminologist-takes-lead-crime-hypothesis
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/02/lead-and-crime-brennan-center-weighs

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I have heard alternate theories for falling crime related to availability of abortions, reulting in less unwanted children. Apparently unwanted children do not prosper. Of course such economic theories are hard to prove and completely control for.

Crime seems to drop the more criminals we put in jail, but that is far from an ideal solution.

JR

JohnRoberts said:

I have heard alternate theories for falling crime related to availability of abortions, reulting in less unwanted children. Apparently unwanted children do not prosper. Of course such economic theories are hard to prove and completely control for.

Crime seems to drop the more criminals we put in jail, but that is far from an ideal solution.

JR

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Yes, it's all been weighed in the review by the Brennan Center:

https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/what-caused-crime-decline

Free ebook. But this thread was about lead. ;-)

On second thought, looking at that ebook I'm not that impressed. They seem to look for correlations more than actual mechanisms of action.  For instance, reduced alcohol consumption correlates with less crime. But the interesting question then would be why less alcohol was consumed. People with reduced executive function tend to drink more alcohol overall and more excessively. Lead exposure in children disrupts brain development in a way that reduces executive function...

There are surely several factors at work, but from what I've read lead may well play an important role.

The abortion theory was disproved thoroughly though, I think by Stephen Pinker.

Yes correlation is not causation and the weakness surrounding most macro-economic theories is poor control for all factors involved.

Yes it is about lead tho...

JR

the very best graphite

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You just reminded me of the book I'm currently reading: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/pencils-and-nothingness

Highly recommended!

I have been working with lead solder for almost 40 years, the bulk of that professionally,  and different heavy metals tests reveal very low lead present.
Ventilation and good practices.
Solder in the mouth?  Yuk
Mike

sodderboy said:

Solder in the mouth?  Yuk

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Bad use of the English language on my part. Sometimes held it jammed between my lips side of mouth when I needed a 3rd hand, nothing went inside my mouth, if that makes sense...like, you know, you would hold solder!?  :-X

Seem to have broken that stupid habit, though. 

On a separate not, I just tried that roll of solder again. It smells incredibly nasty, and says lead free on the sticker. Really curious what it might be.

Gustav

I often wonder if lead is the least of our worries when it comes to soldering. Do any manufacturers give you a comprehensive list of ingredients, other than metal composition? Does any give you a list of the chemicals present in the fumes generated when the solder is melted? We have masses of data regarding the dangers of elevated Pd levels in humans. What about the chemicals from the other agents used in the solder? And are these chemicals uniform across manufacturers (answer: no).

Lead is heavy
LED is light!


Like Thermionic, I worry far more about the nice smell of burning organic flux than the lead itself. And i'm far more scared of anything containing Antimony, which seems to be an additive to some lead free solders.
Tin compounds are toxic too.

We have a saying in the US- "through the lips, to the hips".
I use the spool, vise, mic stand, anything but putting lead near my mouth
Mike

Didn't I sell you a fume extractor, Stewart? It was a few yrs back... Did I sell the on-tip extractor system with it? I seem to remember it being a bit noisy, but effective. The annoying thing is, unless you have the luxury of a separate room to put the extractor in, it tends to make quite a lot of noise. If I'm doing an extended bout of soldering I put it on, but I don't if I'm prototyping and trying to concentrate... If I were a true health+safety man I'd put it on whenever the iron is on... Some of the Pb-free solders have a plasticcy smell to them..it can't be a healthy thing to inhale...