#helen epstein

[foxandcatlibrary]

99th Book I Read in 2025

Title: The Invisible Cure

Author: Helen Epstein

Notes: A bit boring in parts, but overall a good book.

[redshift-13]

Left Behind

America's declining life expectancy and what's causing it.

Very informative and thought-provoking.  Close observers of the American scene won’t see too much new here, but this is still a powerful article.

This was a startling claim: "[researcher] Cherlin maintains that American families may be the most unstable in the world."

American pathologies, seemingly unique or at least extreme beyond that of other countries, are piling up - the evidence is everywhere.  

[youarehe]

Only by looking honestly at our mistakes can we hope to overcome them.

Helen Epstein

[achingster]

La intoxicación por plomo: el escándalo ocultado

La intoxicación por plomo: el escándalo ocultado

Estados Unidos

Escribe: Helen Epstein

1. 

En diciembre de 1993, un casero de un barrio bajo de Baltimore, Lawrence Polakoff, arrendó un piso a una madre soltera de 21 años de edad y su hijo de tres años, Max/1. Pocos días después de instalarse, invitaron a la madre de Max a participar en un estudio comparativo destinado a discernir cómo los diferentes métodos de renovación de las viviendas…

View On WordPress

[jewishbookworld]

Archivist on a Bicycle: Jiří Fiedler edited by Helen Epstein and Wilma Iggers

Archivist on a Bicycle: Jiří Fiedler edited by Helen Epstein and Wilma Iggers

Archivist on a Bicycle is a tribute to Jiří Fiedler, a Czech Protestant, who for most of his life documented extinct Bohemian and Moravian Jewish communities at great danger to himself. His day job was as a children’s book editor; his passion was mapping and archiving the sites of Jewish life in the Czech lands. From the 1970s through 2014, he was an invaluable source for scholars, genealogists,…

View On WordPress

[labrunilde]

Per anni tutto e’ rimasto la’, in una scatola di ferro, sepolta cosi’ profondamente in me stessa che non ho mai saputo esattamente cosa contenesse. Sapevo solo di trasportare cose instabili, infiammabili e più pericolose degli spettri e dei fantasmi.

Helen Epstein

[daviddobbs]

Why Do Military Children Do Better in Reading and Math?

Helen Epstein, in an aside in her fine piece on public-health innovator Sara Josephine Baker, suggests one factor:

[T]here is one group of Americans that receives high-quality government-subsidized child-care services, including day care, preschool,…

View Post

[decanting-cerebral]

Get The Lead Out: Helen Epstein On Our Lead Poisoning Crimes

1.  "The problem began in the early twentieth century when a spate of lead-poisoning cases in children occurred across the United States. The symptoms—vomiting, convulsions, bleeding gums, palsied limbs, and muscle pain so severe “as not to permit of the weight of bed-clothing,” as one doctor described it—were recognizable at once because they resembled the symptoms of factory workers poisoned in the course of enameling bathtubs or preparing paint and gasoline additives. One Dupont factory was even nicknamed “the House of the Butterflies” because so many workers had hallucinations of insects flying around. Many victims had to be taken away in straitjackets; some died.

By the 1920s, it was known that one common cause of childhood lead poisoning was the consumption of lead paint chips. Lead paint was popular in American homes because its brightness appealed to the national passion for hygiene and modernism, but the chips taste sweet, and it could be difficult to keep small children away from them. Because of its well-known dangers, many other countries banned interior lead paint during the 1920s and 1930s, including Belgium, France, Austria, Tunisia, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Sweden, Spain, and Yugoslavia.

In 1922, the League of Nations proposed a worldwide lead paint ban, but at the time, the US was the largest lead producer in the world, and consumed 170,000 tons of white lead paint each year. The Lead Industries Association had grown into a powerful political force, and the pro-business, America-first Harding administration vetoed the ban. Products containing lead continued to be marketed to American families well into the 1970s, and by midcentury lead was everywhere: in plumbing and lighting fixtures, painted toys and cribs, the foil on candy wrappers, and even cake decorations. Because most cars ran on leaded gasoline, its concentration in the air was also increasing, especially in cities."

  2.  "Lead paint was the most insidious danger of all because it can cause brain damage even if it isn’t peeling. Lead dust drifts off walls, year after year, even if you paint over it. It’s also almost impossible to get rid of. Removal of lead paint with electric sanders and torches creates clouds of dust that may rain down on the floor for months afterward, and many children have been poisoned during the process of lead paint removal itself. Even cleaning lead-painted walls with a rag can create enough dust to poison a child. Gut renovating the entire house solves the problem, but this too may contaminate the air around the house for months.

Only in the early 1950s did companies start removing lead from most domestic products. But lead house paint remained in use until the congressional ban in the late 1970s, and it’s still on the walls of some 30 million American homes today.

Minuscule amounts of lead can poison a child. The signs of severe lead poisoning—convulsions, pain, coma, etc.—are typically seen when the concentration of blood lead exceeds sixty micrograms per deciliter (a tenth of a liter) of blood. This corresponds to the ingestion of a total amount of lead weighing about the same as six grains of table salt. According to the Centers for Disease Control, parents should be concerned if their children’s blood lead concentration exceeds five micrograms per deciliter, but studies have found that even infinitesimally low levels—down to one or two micrograms per deciliter—can reduce a child’s IQ and impair her self-control and ability to organize thoughts.

There is no way of knowing how many children were harmed over the past century by America’s decision not to ban lead from consumer products early on, but the number is somewhere in the millions. The most accurate national survey of lead poisoning was probably the 1976–1980 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which found that 4 percent of all children under six—roughly 780,000—had blood lead concentrations exceeding thirty micrograms per deciliter, which was then thought to be the limit of safety.

Black children, the survey found, were six times more likely to have elevated lead than whites. The number of children with lead levels over five micrograms per deciliter—or for that matter over one or two—was obviously much higher, but there’s no way of knowing how high it was. The 1985 leaded gasoline ban and the gradual renovation of slum housing have since reduced the number of poisoned children, so that today, the CDC estimates that some 500,000 children who are between one and five years old have lead levels over five micrograms per deciliter."

  3.  "As the scale and horror of the lead paint problem came to light, the lead companies played down the bad news. When popular magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal began publicizing the dangers of lead poisoning in the 1930s and 1940s, lead and paint manufacturers placed cartoons in National Geographic and The Saturday Evening Post celebrating the joy that lead paint brought into children’s lives. Advertisements for Dutch Boy paint—which contained enough lead in one coat of a two-by-two-inch square to kill a child—depicted their tow-headed mascot painting toys with Father Christmas smiling over his shoulder.

Rather than banning lead from consumer products, government-sponsored public health campaigns characterized lead poisoning as a behavioral problem of the poor that they called “Pica”—a disorder in which people consume inedible substances—and advised parents to control their children. The lead companies also paid scientists who produced flawed studies casting doubt on the link between lead exposure and child health problems. When University of Pittsburgh professor Herbert Needleman first showed that even children with relatively modest lead levels tended to have lower intelligence and more behavioral problems than their lead-free peers, some of these industry-backed researchers claimed that his methods were sloppy and accused him of scientific misconduct (he has since been exonerated).

The companies also hired a public relations firm to influence stories in The Wall Street Journal and other conservative news outlets, which characterized Needleman as part of a leftist plot to increase government spending on housing and other social programs. So, just as the tobacco industry deliberately obfuscated the dangers of cigarettes until skyrocketing smoking-related Medicaid costs finally led state governments to sue the companies, and just as oil company–backed scientists now downplay the dangers of greenhouse gases, the lead industry also lied to Americans for decades, and the government did nothing to stop it."

-- Helen Epstein, "Lead Poisoning: The Ignored Scandal," The New York Review Of Books, March 21 2013

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/mar/21/lead-poisoning-ignored-scandal/