As a fitting end to Lead Awareness Week, the FBI and IRS provide an exciting, high profile demonstration that lead poisoning doesn't only impact poor inner city kids living in old, rotten housing, but impacts white, suburban baby boomers poisoned throughout their longer lives, as well. Though not yet reported in the mainstream media, REALNEO members have documented for years the failures of our growing population of aging and so mentally-declining industry-tainted and functionally defective business and government leadership, and the impact of lead poisoning on the people of all ages of the region. The combination of toxins - especially lead - and an aging population is the explanation for America's failing competitiveness, especially in historically polluted heavy industrial and old, dense urban areas, like Cleveland.

Those most impacted by lead poisoning were exposed over time to lead in paint and gasoline up until the late 1970s... American adults now in their 40s and older... folks who grew up in dense old American cities in the 1930s - 1970s, when lead in gas and paint really covered the country (it was already outlawed in most of the civilized world), and so who have the highest lifetime lead exposures, and so now are the most lead-impacted. Who do you know in that category? Perhaps you... surely your parents... your boss... your County commissioners... McCain!
As an article posted by Bill McDermott points out...

Studying delayed effects in people is difficult because they generally must be followed for a long time. Research with lead is easier because scientists can measure the amount that has accumulated in the shinbone over decades and get a read on how much lead a person has been exposed to in the past.

Lead in the blood, by contrast, reflects recent exposure. Virtually all Americans have lead in their blood, but the amounts are far lower today than in the past.

The big reason for the drop: the phasing out of lead in gasoline from 1976 to 1991. Because of that and accompanying measures, the average lead level in the blood of American adults fell 30 percent by 1980 and about 80 percent by 1990.

That's a major success story for environmentalists. But work by Schwartz and Dr. Howard Hu of the University of Michigan suggests that the long-term effects of the high-lead era are still being felt.

In 2006, Schwartz and his colleagues published a study of about 1,000 Baltimore residents. They were ages 50 to 70, old enough to have absorbed plenty of lead before it disappeared from gasoline. They probably got their peak doses in the 1960s and 1970s, Schwartz says, mostly by inhaling air pollution from vehicle exhaust and from other sources in the environment.

The researchers estimated each person's lifetime dose by scanning their shinbones for lead. Then they gave each one a battery of mental-ability tests.

In brief, the scientists found that the higher the lifetime lead dose, the poorer the performance across a wide variety of mental functions, such as verbal and visual memory and language ability. From low to high dose, the difference in mental functioning was about the equivalent of aging by two to six years.

"We think that's a large effect," Schwartz says.

Hu and his colleagues took a slightly different approach in a 2004 study of 466 men with an average age of 67. Those men took a mental-ability test twice, about four years apart on average. Those with the highest bone lead levels showed more decline between exams than those with smaller levels, with the effect of the lead equal to about five years of aging.

The obvious conclusion is that the world will see more strange behavior and problems with Americans from the lead-headed-generations, for decades to come, as they age poorly, make poor decisions, and fail in many ways, like cheating taxpayers and misleading County government. Unfortunately, these toxic impacts are not reversible - we may only watch for the warning signs where there are problems, like 200 FBI agents storming a County, and contain problem people and their problems... get declining people help with their cognitive decline, and as quickly as possible develop strong young post-lead leadership to take over for the declining, poisoned leaders of today.

These are sad consequences of poor industrial policies and corrupt government over a period of more than a century, and we have not learned any real lessons from the experiences, yet. As more unleaded young people see their parents and older generations decline from pollution, I believe they and their next generations will approach life very differently.

Even though I personally feel and expect to die under the weight of many consequences of the poor leadership of the industrial past, I expect to live clearly long enough to see good signs the future leaders of the world will overcome the stupidity and reduced mental capacity of those who came before them, including myself. That is why I have children, and why Evelyn and I are working hard to keep them and all of the next generations lead free, and one reason we support Obama.