HIO Meeting Announcement and IQ Loss from Lead Exposure

March 27, 2022

Hillsboro Airport Community Advisors Online Meeting - Tuesday 3/29/22

The next online meeting of the Hillsboro Airport Community Advisors is scheduled for Tuesday, March 29, 2022 from 3:00 to 6:00 PM.

The Port of Portland Zoom link to attend this meeting can be accessed at https://www.portofportland.com/Community/Events.

Jayson Shanafelt is the Port's Community Affairs contact. If questions about the meeting should arise, he can be reached at 503-703-7990 or by email at Jayson.Shanafelt@portofportland.com.

Per their website, "Topics include Hillsboro Airport updates and a presentation by Bill Braack, President of the Oregon International Air Show." There is an opportunity for public comment.

Though lead was banned from automotive fuel in 1996, it is still used in nearly all of the piston-engine aircraft flown by flight students and recreational pilots, such as those that account for the majority of operations at HIO.

The Hillsboro Airport (HIO), which ranks 8th in the nation among 20,000 airports in lead emissions, is the number one facility source of airborne lead pollution in Oregon. Despite comprehensive documentation attesting to the negative impacts of lead exposure even in small doses, HIO continues to promote the activities of student pilots who often circle and loop repetitively over homes, neighborhoods, playgrounds, recreational areas, schools, daycare centers, prime farmland, and waterways, all the while dousing impacted residents with this pernicious neurotoxin. Private and recreational pilots are also significant contributors to the pollution and noise burden generated by this airport.

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New Study Confirms Dramatic IQ Loss From Lead Exposure

Half the US Population Exposed to Adverse Lead Levels in Early Childhood appeared in the 3/7/2022 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As noted in the abstract,

"The average lead-linked loss in cognitive ability was 2.6 IQ points per person as of 2015. This amounted to a total loss of 824,097,690 IQ points, disproportionately endured by those born between 1951 and 1980."

Below are several excerpts from Duke Today, a Duke University Publication, about a report on the substantial IQ loss due to lead exposure from automotive fuel. Lead Exposure in Last Century Shrank IQ Scores of Half of Americans

DURHAM, N.C. -- In 1923, lead was first added to gasoline to help keep car engines healthy. However, automotive health came at the great expense of our own well-being.

A new study calculates that exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood stole a collective 824 million IQ points from more than 170 million Americans alive today, about half the population of the United States.

The findings, from Aaron Reuben, a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at Duke University, and colleagues at Florida State University, suggest that Americans born before 1996 may now be at greater risk for lead-related health problems, such as faster aging of the brain. Leaded gas for cars was banned in the U.S. in 1996, but the researchers say that anyone born before the end of that era, and especially those at the peak of its use in the 1960s and 1970s, had concerningly high lead exposures as children...

Lead is neurotoxic and can erode brain cells after it enters the body. As such, there is no safe level of exposure at any point in life, health experts say. Young children are especially vulnerable to lead's ability to impair brain development and lower cognitive ability. Unfortunately, no matter what age, our brains are ill-equipped for keeping it at bay.

"Lead is able to reach the bloodstream once it's inhaled as dust, or ingested, or consumed in water," Reuben said. "In the bloodstream, it's able to pass into the brain through the blood-brain barrier, which is quite good at keeping a lot of toxicants and pathogens out of the brain, but not all of them..."

As of 2015, more than 170 million Americans (more than half of the U.S. population) had clinically concerning levels of lead in their blood when they were children, likely resulting in lower IQs and putting them at higher risk for other long-term health impairments, such as reduced brain size, greater likelihood of mental illness, and increased cardiovascular disease in adulthood...

Dropping a few IQ points may seem negligible, but the authors note that these changes are dramatic enough to potentially shift people with below-average cognitive ability (IQ score less than 85) to being classified as having an intellectual disability (IQ score below 70).

To read the entire article click here.