Wharfie, if you look at the dates, you will see "1995" on that. By then, pretty much everyone who was paying some attention realized that having lead in petrol, or even gasoline for Americas, had understood that lead was damaging brains though even then, and as I explained, despite being carefully informed about it, they still didn't actually understand properly. They were still saying "risk", "potential harm" and the like rather than "the lead is doing and has done damage to brains."
1995 might seem a long time ago to you, but in 1993, it was still the distant future.
Maybe years in your mind are foggy because your brain has been poisoned, but 1973 was 20 years before that. Catalytic converters were introduced then. The reason to introduce catalytic converters was Los Angeles smog in particular and pollution generally. It was only in the 1980s that the opposition to lead in its own right really got going.
Science based and reasoning people in the early 1980s read Needleman et al [you can ask Google about him if you want to clear some fogs of ignorance from your mind]. He produced some nice graphs of lead versus IQ. One could also apply reasoning such as the fact that clinically evident brain poisoning occurred at levels only 3 times the level that were found in many children, so it was not a stretch of imagination to think that blood levels were far too high for safety.
The reason for stopping lead back in the 1970s in the USA was to avoid poisoning the catalytic converters. That also pushed Europe along to getting lead out.
The other big problem with lead was the ubiquity of it in house paint, which deteriorates and poisons children. The lead from petrol was only about quarter the total lead burden in children. Maybe it was a third [I forget now].
Next year is 2015, that's 20 years after 1995. 1995 was 20 years after 1975. Do you see the difference?
Mqurice |
