Lead is even deadlier than we feared, but Brexit could put it back in our petrol | Geoffrey Lean

Decades after this newspaper won a ban on this poison in our fuel, there are still calls for more proof

Looking back, it seems insane. Bluntly put, we took a known poison and – for three quarters of a century – used it in machines that puffed it out in breathable form. Then we drove them millions of miles a day, all over the world, regularly dosing billions of people with the toxin.

Now the full effects of using lead in petrol – surely the greatest ever mass poisoning experiment – are becoming clear, almost exactly 35 years after an award-winning Observer campaign caused it to be banned in Britain. They seem far worse than anyone imagined, and provide a stark warning against cutting pollution standards after Brexit. Last week, a massive new study concluded that lead is 10 times more dangerous than thought, and that past exposure now hastens one in every five US deaths. A similar effect is expected in Britain and other industrialised countries.

British children had to be shown to be affected as well as US ones – as if they were different species

Continue reading... March 18, 2018 at 12:30AM