# Did my dad poison a bunch of Sunday school Children? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 4, 2013, 4:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070 "2013-01-04T16:19:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Buck\_Godot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/buck_godot/32/6573_2.png) [@Buck\_Godot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Buck_Godot)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 4:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/1 "2013-01-04T16:19:17Z")
Way back in the 80’s my families church hosted a bible camp that involved the children learning about biblical times. My dad decided to host a booth to teach about early coinage. To do this he collected a bunch of used lead bullets from a local rifle range, which he melted and molded into small thick discs. These were passed out to the children who pounded them with a hammer until they were coin sized, used other stamps to make designs and then could take home their “coins” as a souvenir. I imagine that many of the children had lead all over their hands and then went on to have cookies a juice. These days in the era of hyper-vigilance about childhood exposure to lead I’m sure that his activity would not be allowed, and I’ve always been slightly worried about what affect this activity might have had on the children. ---
**Author:** ![drewtwo99](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d07c76/32.png) [@drewtwo99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drewtwo99)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/2 "2013-01-04T16:27:29Z")
I believe lead is one of those lifelong “cumulative” things like mercury. If this is true, he definitely contributed to a lifelong poisoning. But in the grand scheme of things, didn’t contribute all that much probably. ---
**Author:** ![si\_blakely](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@si\_blakely](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/si_blakely)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/3 "2013-01-04T16:32:42Z")
This [link](http://www.lab-initio.com/250dpi/nz015.jpg) may help 😃 As the comic says - metallic lead has pretty low bioavailability, even with a bit of working. And it was only for a short time. The real problems were with flaking lead paint, where the lead was a chromate or carbonate - much higher bioavailability. People are rarely poisoned by embedded bullets, for example (but bullets in joints are more problematic). Si ---
**Author:** ![GusNSpot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gusnspot/32/436_2.png) [@GusNSpot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GusNSpot)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/4 "2013-01-04T18:27:28Z")
I wonder what % of my Mercury tolerance I have used up over the years? Is there a test for that? Carbon Tet? Do tire balance worker guys have on avg a shorter life span? I’m 69 & big, should I get a casket ordered? ---
**Author:** ![Dog80](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/6bbea6/32.png) [@Dog80](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dog80)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 6:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/5 "2013-01-04T18:35:11Z")
Tire balancing weights are lead-free since long ago (ten years?) ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/6 "2013-01-04T18:39:19Z")
Children who played with lead toys in the past such as toy soldiers occasionally showed elevated levels of lead. I doubt playing with a few lead disks made any difference. When I developed kidney problems they looked for elevated levels of metal in my system, and found none. This despite my handling large amounts of lead solder and lead fishing weights. In contrast, I believe I’ve had zinc poisoining once and wished I could die. Some metals work faster than others. ---
**Author:** ![Quercus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/7ab992/32.png) [@Quercus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quercus)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 6:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/7 "2013-01-04T18:41:38Z")
> [@si\_blakely](#): > > As the comic says - metallic lead has pretty low bioavailability, even with a bit of working. And it was only for a short time. The real problems were with flaking lead paint, where the lead was a chromate or carbonate - much higher bioavailability. Or lead from gasoline which is also in a very bioavailable form. ---
**Author:** ![Snnipe\_70E](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5a626/32.png) [@Snnipe\_70E](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snnipe_70E)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 6:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/8 "2013-01-04T18:45:15Z")
> [@Quercus](#): > > Or lead from gasoline which is also in a very bioavailable form. I knew a roofer who claimed before unleaded gasoline lead posioning was common for the trade. They would use gas to clean the tar from their hands. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Second\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@The\_Second\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Second_Stone)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/9 "2013-01-04T18:46:40Z")
Back in the Dark Ages, Dungeons and Dragons was played with lead miniatures. I am intellectually challenged to this day because of that. ---
**Author:** ![panache45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/panache45/32/64_2.png) [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/10 "2013-01-04T18:50:33Z")
Growing up in the '50s, I remember playing with mercury from broken thermometers, several times. I also inhaled lots of carbon tetrachloride, to kill insects for my collection. And we freely used DDT in our backyard garden. And all paint had lead back then. Not to mention toxic art supplies and classrooms with asbestos ceilings. The results . . . um . . . speak for themselves. ---
**Author:** ![kaylasdad99](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/32/3398_2.png) [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 7:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/11 "2013-01-04T19:08:43Z")
> [@GusNSpot](#): > > I wonder what % of my Mercury tolerance I have used up over the years? Is there a test for that? > > Carbon Tet? > > Do tire balance worker guys have on avg a shorter life span? > > I’m 69 & big, should I get a casket ordered? > [@Dog80](#): > > Tire balancing weights are lead-free since long ago (ten years?) So, since he was 59… ---
**Author:** ![Shagnasty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9dc877/32.png) [@Shagnasty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shagnasty)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 8:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/12 "2013-01-04T20:01:34Z")
When I was about 10, I had a big block of lead that I used to melt on the stove in a cast iron pot and mold into whatever I felt like then I would play with it before melting it again over and over. No dain bramage as far as I no. Things just weren’t dangerous back then like they are today. My mother was a science teacher and kids loved it when she did the mercury demonstration where she would let them roll it around and push it around a plate with their fingers. ---
**Author:** ![samclem](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a9a28c/32.png) [@samclem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/samclem)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 8:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/13 "2013-01-04T20:11:55Z")
> [@Shagnasty](#): > > Things just weren’t dangerous back then like they are today. Please tell the readers that you’re just joking. ---
**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/14 "2013-01-04T21:10:48Z")
> [@samclem](#): > > Please tell the readers that you’re just joking. > [@Shagnasty](#): > > No dain bramage as far as I no. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Michael63129](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/3da27b/32.png) [@Michael63129](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Michael63129)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 10:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/15 "2013-01-04T22:46:28Z")
I played with lead all the time as a kid (1990s), due to by electronics hobby, and still do, even though I use lead-free solder I still find lots of discarded electronics that use lead solder; you should see how dirty my hands get; when I wash them (something I was negligent about as a kid), the soap that drips off is **dark gray** (I wash them twice to be safe) and I have to say that I’m fine today. Also, besides what others have said about metallic lead, your body actually DOES eliminate heavy metals, or we’d all be advised to NEVER eat fish since even a tiny exposure would accumulate to dangerous levels over time. For lead, [elimination is actually pretty fast](http://www.osc.state.ny.us/reports/health/childleadpoisoning.pdf), especially in an adult (you can see the concern for childhood exposure though, plus growing bones will uptake some of it where it can leach lead out years later, which could be especially bad if you get osteoporosis): > [@](#): > > In adults, once lead is absorbed, about 99 percent will > exit the body within a couple of weeks through natural excretion. In > contrast, much less lead, only about 32 percent, leaves a child’s body within > the same time period. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/16 "2013-01-04T23:06:19Z")
[_Mother Jones_ has an interesting article on how the rise of tetraethyl lead (that is, leaded gasoline) lead to a rise in criminality, and its ban lead to the massive decline in crime in the 1990s:](http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline) > [@](#): > > Experts often suggest that crime resembles an epidemic. But what kind? Karl Smith, a professor of public economics and government at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, has a good [rule of thumb for categorizing epidemics](http://modeledbehavior.com/2012/01/08/on-lead/): If it spreads along lines of communication, he says, the cause is information. Think Bieber Fever. If it travels along major transportation routes, the cause is microbial. Think influenza. If it spreads out like a fan, the cause is an insect. Think malaria. But if it’s everywhere, all at once—as both the rise of crime in the '60s and '70s and the fall of crime in the '90s seemed to be—the cause is a molecule. > > [snip] > > In 1994, Rick Nevin was a consultant working for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on the costs and benefits of removing lead paint from old houses. This has been a topic of intense study because of the growing body of research linking lead exposure in small children with a whole raft of complications later in life, including lower IQ, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, and learning disabilities. > > [snip] > > The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn’t paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted. > > Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years. > > So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a [2000 paper](http://www.ricknevin.com/uploads/Nevin_2000_Env_Res_Author_Manuscript.pdf) (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. > > [snip] > > What’s more, a single correlation between two curves isn’t all that impressive, econometrically speaking. Sales of vinyl LPs rose in the postwar period too, and then declined in the '80s and '90s. Lots of things follow a pattern like that. So no matter how good the fit, if you only have a single correlation it might just be a coincidence. You need to do something more to establish causality. > > As it turns out, however, a few hundred miles north someone was doing just that. In the late '90s, Jessica Wolpaw Reyes was a graduate student at Harvard casting around for a dissertation topic that eventually became a study she published in 2007 as a public health policy professor at Amherst. > > [snip] > > During the '70s and '80s, the introduction of the catalytic converter, combined with increasingly stringent Environmental Protection Agency rules, steadily reduced the amount of leaded gasoline used in America, but Reyes discovered that this reduction wasn’t uniform. In fact, use of leaded gasoline varied widely among states, and this gave Reyes the opening she needed. If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you’d expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly. And that’s [exactly what she found](http://www.nber.org/papers/w13097). The article is quite long; my snippets are tiny in comparison. _By all means read the whole thing instead of just my excerpts if you intend to critique the conclusion._ Reading the material it links to is a good idea as well, just to be honest. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 11:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/17 "2013-01-04T23:13:08Z")
> [@GusNSpot](#): > > I wonder what % of my Mercury tolerance I have used up over the years? Is there a test for that? > > Carbon Tet? > > Do tire balance worker guys have on avg a shorter life span? > > I’m 69 & big, should I get a casket ordered? Nah. Sounds like we can just hammer you flat and use you to line someone else’s casket. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 11:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/18 "2013-01-04T23:13:23Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > [_Mother Jones_ has an interesting article on how the rise of tetraethyl lead (that is, leaded gasoline) lead to a rise in criminality, and its ban lead to the massive decline in crime in the 1990s:](http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline)The article is quite long; my snippets are tiny in comparison. _By all means read the whole thing instead of just my excerpts if you intend to critique the conclusion._ Reading the material it links to is a good idea as well, just to be honest. This [GD thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=673972)addressed that topic. ---
**Author:** ![panache45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/panache45/32/64_2.png) [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2013, 4:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/19 "2013-01-05T04:11:04Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > Nah. Sounds like we can just hammer you flat and use you to line someone else’s casket. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Shagnasty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9dc877/32.png) [@Shagnasty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shagnasty)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2013, 4:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070/20 "2013-01-05T04:51:52Z")
> [@samclem](#): > > Please tell the readers that you’re just joking. I was joking but the facts of the case are true. I did used to play with lead as a child along with lots of other things including mercury. It isn’t the safest thing in the world but it generally takes time to get significant exposure to cause health risks. It can happen to kids who like to munch lead paint off of the walls but plenty of people have been exposed lots more lead than the OP alluded to including fishermen with their line weights and everyone that ever got near a road before the 1970’s when unleaded gas became the norm. That was the end of the Age of Aquarius. We are now living in the Age of Hysteria where decontamination squads get called into schools because someone found an unbroken mercury thermometer like everyone had at home 20 years ago. The short answer to OP is no, your father didn’t poison any children. Casual short-term lead exposure doesn’t cause any health risks and was unavoidable throughout most of the 20th century. Long-term exposure can be really bad but what is described is not the same thing at all. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-my-dad-poison-a-bunch-of-sunday-school-children/646070.md?page=2)