I guess this means the asbestos is gone?
read jen gunter on this, breathe & give yourself permission to not freak out about this --- plenty else to freak out about! but not i think this - https://open.substack.com/pub/vajenda/p/dont-panic-about-lead-in-tampons?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=98rx
120 nanograms of lead per gram (and a tampon is about a gram, more or less, isn't it? so that's 120 ng per tampon) does not sound like a very large amount.
The legal limit in the UK for lead in drinking water is 10 micrograms per litre (the WHO agrees, saying "it is diffficult to achieve lower than 10 ug/l with central treatment").
So, even assuming that you absorb 100% of the lead in a tampon, you would experience harm thereby equivalent to that suffered from drinking 12 millilitres, or two-fifths of a fluid ounce, of legally safe tap water.
I note further that the safe limit for lead in, for example, beef, is 0.1mg (milligrams, not micrograms) per kg, meaning that a 12-ounce steak may legally contain as much lead as 283 average tampons. If you accompany that with a typical serving of fries, then beware even more! They may legally contain another eighty tampons-full of lead.
I merely provide the data. You may do with them as you will.
I think the obvious conclusion is that it would be extremely unwise to substitute a baked potato for a tampon, but I appreciate that this may be mansplaining something that most of you have already worked out for yourselves.
This reminds me of one of my friends who is a physicist and TAed for some gen ed course where a whole bunch of it was just trying to get people to understand the scale of radiation risk. Like how many x-rays you could get a year before it was more radiation exposure than moving to Denver or to how much radiation exposure you get from sharing a bed with a person for a year (rather than sleeping alone).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
Great!!
So if I'm following, you all do not think tampons are a leading cause of Biden's cognitive decline. Interesting.
how much radiation exposure you get from sharing a bed with a person for a year (rather than sleeping alone).
But what if they're sleeping between you and a nearby nuclear accident, tampon or potato? They could be providing shielding!
Tampon or Potato is the new Is It Cake?
6: I had professional occasion to be looking at a question of radiation exposure a while back at work, and for my own information converted it roughly into what you would get from approaching a banana. It was measurable in the low dozens of bananas.
Another way to get at this is that the FDA maximum allowed daily intake for lead in food was lowered from 6 micrograms to 3 micograms recently. So kids would be allowed to eat 25 tampons a day.
They do say the need followup research on how absorption happens. You could imagine some scenario where vaginal absorption is more thorough (say some of the lead you eat just passes the whole way through the body or ends up in gut bacteria or whatever) or more easily reaches the brain or something. But there's no reason to worry yet.
The confusing point is that there's no "safe" level of lead, all of it causes damage. But that doesn't mean there's not a "normal" amount of lead that you can't avoid.
Overall, on questions of toxicity, I will worry about exposures over some limit set by a responsible agency, or about credible epidemiological evidence that whatever it is actually causes some effect. Without either of those, life's too short.
Scientists and agencies should keep working to develop sensible exposure limits, and they should be enforced, but without a professional telling me there's something real to worry about I'm not going to.
At $10/banana, an x-ray might be a cheaper way to get your radiation exposure.
14.1: the average American has a blood concentration of about a microgram of lead per decilitre, so this rule was a real shock for health-conscious vampires.
One thing I've learned is that baking potatoes isn't easy. Good restaurants get them much better than I've been able to do.
Somewhere former Harvard President Larry Summers is saying: "Aha! So that explains it!"
I saw this discussed on ChemSky and it's not a concern. First, they really beat the crap out of the tampon with strong acid and microwaving to extract everything. Unless you have other issues that's much harsher than the average vaginal environment. Even so the amount extracted in minuscule and the only reason they even have a story here is because they used the most sensitive form of mass spec to detect metals. With technology from 20 years ago they probably wouldn't have even been able to measure a signal above the LOD.
19: how do you mess up baked potatoes?
There's always radiation in the banana stand.
I just turned down my semi-annual x-ray at the dentist because I'm skittish about all sorts of things in the vague environmental toxins bin.
22: If I knew, I wouldn't mess them up. But good ones are almost fluffy. Mine aren't.
Also, I've never had a dentist do semi-annual x-rays. It's always annual.
AHA! THAT EXPLAINS IT.
25: maybe you aren't baking them for long enough? Id give them 90 minutes in the oven at least, low heat. And rub some oil and salt on the skins before you put them in.
I was hoping for something simple, like lead sprinkles.
Stuff them with something cottony and absorbent. You'll need a mechanism to pull it out when it's full.
Yeah, baked potatoes need to bake for a long time. Less if you parboil them first.
28 is correct. Honestly they can sit in tinfoil along a campfire for hours and turn out great, so I use that as my heuristic.
A campfire is an actual heat source, not just a heuristic.
The other trick is to open them as soon as they come out of the oven to let the steam out.
Like stab them or are they wrapped in foil?
35: Is it your opinion as a medical authority that we should cook tampons to get the lead out?
Using the standard technique of burning it in a enclosed chamber and measuring how much water around the chamber increases in temperature, how many calories are in a tampon?
The longer tampons are in, the more enriched in iron they become. I assume the same holds for potatos then.
37: Quite a lot. I've been carrying a couple round in my top right pocket for years, for exactly that purpose.
you all do not think tampons are a leading cause of Biden's cognitive decline
Camilla Parker-Bowles should take a neurological test.
OT: The AI thread fell off the front page, but I am, for reasons of dutifulness, trying to buy a spring for a garden tiller. The fucks have paragraph-long text descriptions of the parts with absolutely no useful information. It might be just copy-pasta, but I'm going to blame AI because I can't find the needed descriptive information in the soup of shit.
43: Is the soup of shit not tasty? Should I have added more tampons?