Yes, Virginia, Lead IS Toxic
This is a follow-up to earlier posts regarding the toxicity of lead, and is in response to an 8 July 2025 article on the Associated Press website titled “A Kindergarten in China Added Lead to Food, and Over 200 Children are Affected.”
Here are links to two of my rants that touch on this subject:
Lead in Our Water and Cognitive Decline
Anyway, the short version on this one is pretty much summed up in the title of the AP article. Feel free to read it yourself, but a couple quotes may be appropriate:
State broadcaster CCTV, citing a police official, said the school in Gansu province added the paint to try to attract more students and increase revenue.
(BTW: In America, we think CCTV means “closed-circuit television” and it does, but in China, CCTV (China Central Television) is a Chinese government-owned television network.)
The Heshi Peixin Kindergarten in Tianshui city bought the paint online and added it while preparing the food, according to CCTV. High levels of lead were found in a three-color breakfast cake and a sausage dish for dinner.
Hey, don’t we do the same here in the United States? Not with lead-based paint, of course — we’re so much smarter than that — but with the food dyes we use to encourage ALL of us to pull out our wallets (or badger mom/dad to pull out theirs). But I digress…
Of the 251 students at the kindergarten, 233 had abnormal lead levels, with 201 receiving hospital treatment, the report said. The World Health Organization says exposure is “particularly harmful” to young children, including in the development of the central nervous system. “There is no level of exposure to lead that is known to be without harmful effects,” WHO says.
Eight people, including the headmaster, have been detained.
I’m reminded of a quote which I think was from a late 1960’s vintage comedy album by the Firesign Theatre titled “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers”. This sentiment may also have been paraphrased later by Cheech and Chong (although, as evidenced by the stuff I was exposing myself to in the 60s and early 70s, my memory could be a bit wonky):
Bailiff, whack his pee-pee off
But no matter what they do to these budding capitalists in China, I would image that RFK, Jr. would have something to say if this happened under his watch.
UPDATE from later in the day (8 July 2025)
This story is gaining traction (as one could expect, considering the reality of the situation), and we’re starting to get some art.
The above image is taken from an article on the BBC news website (a source of information which I tend to gravitate to — not nearly the biased slant that BOTH sides impart on U.S. based news sites). According to the BBC, the total number of kindergarten kids affected by the lead poisoning still stands at 233 students.
Eight people have been arrested after tests showed the food samples from a kindergarten in Tianshui City in Gansu province had lead levels that were 2,000 times over the national safety limit.
In total, 233 children from Peixin Kindergarten had high levels of lead in their blood after eating steamed red date cake and sausage corn bun.
The school principal asked the kitchen staff to buy the paint online, according to a police statement.
