When I was in high school, my teacher once told us a crazy story. When he started teaching in Northern England in the late 1970s, he and the other teachers would often talk in the break room about how their students seemed to be getting dumber every year. It was so strange — the kind of thing you might say with a worried laugh but no explanation. Smart primary schoolers turned into middle schoolers that just didn’t get things.
Years later, he connected the dots: the school was at the bottom of a hill, in a little valley, and the playground right by the busy main road. All the exhaust fumes pooled and hung in the air there. And these were the 1970s: literally all the gasoline was leaded.1 This was lead poisoning. Over the years, the children were getting brain damage.
Nobody knew. There was no pediatric lead testing.2Later pilot studies in Birmingham, Manchester, and Glasgow would eventually confirm this: children were found to have average blood lead levels of 3-5x the safe maximum. Just imagine what the severe cases looked like.
This story has stuck with me. It features the shocking and tragic loss of healthy lives — condemned to live in functional disability — brought about by many well-intentioned people doing their best, trusting that the status quo is safe and normal. But it often isn’t — what you hope and trust to be fine is secretly killing you.