Considering lots of people grew up with so much lead exposure in the past and that lead negatively affects every organ in the human body. As well as, the fact that lots of people were being exposed since they were babies, I don’t get how there are plenty of people 80+ years old these days in decent health?
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It’s a numbers game. Like most environmental health issues, lead exposure affects different people in different amounts and different ways. It’s not like everyone exposed to X amount of lead is thereafter fated to die on their 85th birthday. Lead exposure may have dramatically shortened the lifespans of some, while for others it had no effect – either because their “dose” was low or because they died for some other reason before lead exposure became an issue.
You can notice the effects across an entire population, but even then it gets tricky. We can’t know how much lead exposure reduced life expectancy across the entire country, because we don’t have a “counterfactual” scenario with no lead exposure to compare it to. The best we can do is compare people who got small amounts of lead exposure to people who got high amounts, but even that is imperfect because exposure is often determined by what neighborhood people grew up in, and neighborhoods with other structural disadvantages were also more likely to be affected by pollution.
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