Well, look at your post #101; as you said that level of lead has been "deemed acceptable," not that it's healthy, and was reduced only a couple of years ago. i think you can bet that regulatory level will be reduced again, so what's considered safe now won't be tomorrow. it sure isn't going up.
If you look at the second Cosmos, ep. 7, the entire episode is about lead, and Neil deGrasse Tyson directly states the medical consensus is that no amount of lead is safe. my other references are below:
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs379/en/ note the sixth and seventh bullet points
http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/ Note the first sentence of the last paragraph where they state "No safe blood lead level has been identified."
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/pdf/other/su6104.pdf Note where they state: "To date, no safe blood lead threshold for the adverse effects of lead on infant or child neurodevelopment has been identified (2)."
http://extension.psu.edu/natural-re...ter-testing/pollutants/lead-in-drinking-water note where they say:
Accounting for other sources of lead exposure (e.g., food, dust), the U.S. EPA set the maximum allowable concentration of lead in public drinking water at 15 µg/L. (Many experts on lead toxicology believe the safe level should be 10 µg/L or less, but for purposes of this discussion we will use the EPA’s level of 15 µg/L.) Since lead serves no beneficial purpose in the human body, it is best if drinking water contains no lead. State drinking water standards must be at least as strict as the EPA drinking water standard of 15 µg/L.
There is another link of a study commissioned by the CDC that says the old notion of a "toxic limit" is fundamentally flawed because any amount of lead in the body is toxic. I'll try to find it if you want, but some simple google searches turned up harmonious results so IDK that i need to provide any more references.
The data I posted has been all over the place. Some of it is in the link I just posted. What other link do you want?
i would like you to provide a link that explains why water with 5 to 15 ppb of lead is safe to consume? that's the issue. that link just explains how the law/regulations apply and the chemistry behind what happened, it has nothing to say about the safety of these arbitrary (5, 10, 15 ppb) government regulations.
You are kind of confusing the two measurements.
Thanks for the clarification, but still not the essence of my post. Besides, lead levels in blood are a function of lead in the environment. So having lead in your water supply will move the lead level to closer to the toxic limit.
There are always safe levels so the notion that MDs want to go to some sort of zero tolerant extremes is a bit much. Some elements are very valuable in trace amounts and we don't know why...selenium for example.
That's true, but lead is not one of those trace metals the body needs. having no lead is not an extreme; and will become the health standard.
Lead has been everywhere so I'm not sure humans have ever even been in a 0 lead environment to know the difference.
The opposite is true, most humans most of the time before the industrial revolution had no reason to encounter lead in their environment.
Most everything has beneficial effects at certain limits, is benign/safe at other limits, and is toxic at higher limits, even water. It's called drowning (chemistry joke).
I agree with that, but lead is not one of those things. current research is challenging the notion that there is any safe limit at all for a fundamentally toxic element.
You haven't explained why regulatory limits for lead in the bloodstream or water supply are the same as what is actually safe for a human.