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this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2024
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China didn't ban it until 2000.
It's still legal in like Afghanistan and North Korea.
Japan was the first to ban it in 1986.
Edit: to answer your question more accurately, any country with vehicles that had engines prone to knocking had it. So yes, it was very much in the atmosphere of China.
We're all still being affected by this to some extent. Effectively by putting it in the gas and burning it, we also spread it though out the environment. Obviously not as bad as rawdawging the fumes themselves like the lead head boomer and genexers, but it's in the dust of the world you live in. You are doing way better than the generations previously. Interestingly, the generations looking to roll back the kind of regulations that protected you are the ones most affected by the lead (boomer, Gen x).
While the lead poisoning wouldn't cause the toxic thinking, racism, and belief in conspiracy theories - it would have made them much more susceptible to it from those around them.
Like all good science, correlation does not imply causation. However, we do know that lead does accumulate in brain tissue, and we can see that the rise of lead in the atmosphere had a very strong correlation with violent crime, and the reduction of it reduced violent crime. This study and IQ show the relationship as well.