Abusing children and damaging them for life

how is this even possible?

I’m trying to write this article with a shrunken IQ. No not because of age related cognitive decline, nor alcohol or tobacco use, I and millions of others have got shrunken IQs because we spent time breathing in lead contaminated car exhaust fumes. Whilst governments did nothing and petrol lobbyists used their wargames strategies to deny, debunk or drown out the research that showed how toxic the lead was, and is, millions of us had out intellects damaged, with no way of healing it nor getting those IQ points back. Nobody has been imprisoned for this crime against a generation and lead pollution continues today, in some countries from traffic fumes in others from water pipes.

When someone whose IQ was damaged in this way comes across the research showing the harm that was done to them as a child the response is often shock and anger. I was just a kid, why didn’t my guardians and the political leaders protect me? How could something like this happen? Seriously? You damaged my brain when I was little?

20 years of infighting before leaded petrol was banned in most countries, two decades, millions and millions of children, damaged for the rest of our lives.

Children are, in general, smaller than adults. This means that a dose of pollution is more harmful to them than it is to someone bigger. Children are also subjected to continual command and control, they are not free agents, their activities are, for the most part, organised by those people who are their guardians. Children are learning to understand the world around them and this too is led and controlled by their guardians and teachers. If they are not told that their school is right next to a busy road and that the quality of air they breath all day is highly polluted, how would they know? Even if they were told about it, what could they do?

Pushed and prodded by car manfacturers who have often twisted statistics and research results, governments have staggered from one toxic farce to another. Leaded petrol gave way to unleaded petrol which pollutes in a different way so the use of catalytic converters was enforced. Then some of these political leaders started listening to scientists who were warning about emssions of greenhouse gases. The motor industry, keen to replace the cars already on the road, presented diesel fuel as the way ahead to fight against climate change. Except … as we all know too well diesel engines produce toxic microparticles and these blow around and get into children’s lungs, damaging them and causing a range of other negative health impacts.

More recently people have started asking themselves where does all the material that gets worn off tyres go? Microplastic particles that are breathed in and eaten by children and, for the moment, we don’t have enough data to know how much harm this is doing.

Fortunately everything is going to be alright. People are acting, things are getting done. Air filters are going to be installed in schools to scrub out the pollution before the kids breath it in. When this is tied to scheduled window opening, meaning don’t open the windows at peak traffic times, classroom pollution for a road facing room can be reduced by an incredible 18%.

Now I’m just a poor sod who had his IQ damaged but this sounds like total bollocks. My dentist reckons that prevention is better than cure and that one should address causes and not symptoms, I’m inclined to agree with her. Which brings up another theme.

When we switched to grain crop agriculture we started to have more and more problems with our teeth. Today and for decades children have open access to sweets and sweetened drinks. I did when I was a kid so while my IQ was being laminated by leaded petrol my teeth were being destroyed by sugar. Luckily for the Gen Z’s and Gen AI’s some governments introduced a sugar tax, in the UK this has led to a drop of about 12% in admissions for rotten tooth extraction amongst the under 18s. Well done again! A drop of 12%, a mighty, if tardy, triumph for public health and government since the tax was imposed in 2018. I suppose that nobody knew that sugar was a leading cause of tooth decay and that sweets are basically sugar before that date. Another way to deal with childhood tooth decay is similar to the ‘pollute the air but filter it into schools’ approach, dental sealants. These are plastic coatings painted over teeth to protect them, yes plastic and yes the coating breaks down after a very few years and the plastic passes into the body. The majority of coatings contain bisphenol A, which, if my damaged cognitive functions remember correctly are bad for health.

The prevelance of childhood obesity, asthma, allergies/hayfever and eczema have all increased dramatically over recent decades. The first is preventable, the others probably are too but we don’t as yet know what environmental or dietary factors are causing them. We do know that children who drink unpasturised ‘farm milk’ are much less likely to suffer from asthma and hayfever.

Too few countries have introduced measures to reduce the percentage of toxic fake food in children’s diets, Columbia being the most recent having introduced supplementary taxes on ultra-processed foods. In Brazil the Programa Nacional de Alimentação Escolar (PNAE) requires that > 30% of food procured for schools must come from local family farmers. In 2013 Brazil strengthened the law with regulations requiring a minimum of three servings of fruits and vegetables per week, prohibition of sugary drinks, and maximum values for added sugar, fat, saturated fat, trans fat, and sodium in processed foods. This was in 2013, did the law makers in Brazil know something that others didn’t? No, not really, they were just prepared to fight the lobbies and PROTECT their children.

Rage, anger, frustration? What would be the right response? All of them really but even better turn that anger into action. Support Bite back, sue local authorities who refuse to act and protect our children. In general we need to rid ourselves of politicial leaders, local or national, who collaborate with the polluting and health destroying industries either by doing nothing or by blocking legislation.

With regard to the parents who insist on driving their kids to school and thus making the pollution worse their argument is that: ‘Letting kids walk to school is too dangerous because there are so many cars’. We can sympathise with these parents and their twisted logic because they undoubtedly had their IQ’s hammered by lead pollution too.