Lead pigment in turmeric is the culprit in a global poisoning mystery (2024)

I'm put off by how this is framed as a detective story. Pesticides that contain heavy metals and other carcinogens are a well known issue, with India (and South Asia more generally) being the worst affected.

> You'll never guess the culprit

Not knowing about turmeric comes off as deeply ignorant when a billion people consume it as part of their daily diet.

> They don't know that this is harmful for human health

Let me assure you that they absolutely do and they couldn't care less. This also makes it seem like poor clueless farmers are to blame while mega-corporations that process, package, market and distribute these spices are never given even a passing mention!

Of course they know. But human life has very little value in Bangladesh. You’re socialized to desensitize yourself to it.

Heavy metals are so easy and cheap to test for that every distributor should be testing every batch, and calling the police if contamination is detected.

I quite enjoyed it. You're in a different part of the world and only have access to lead level data from your local population. You spot an anomaly in a cultural subgroup. Then through extensive guesswork you pinpoint a cause to a specific additive to a spice often consumed by folks in this culture. I would say that qualifies as a detective story.

But anyway, lead chromate is not a pesticide. The level of harm from pesticides containing heavy metals vs lead chromate is different. You're probably much much less likely to see lead poisoning levels in your blood just by consuming food treated only with pesticides.

This isn't about pesticides, and it isn't about not knowing about turmeric; it's about lead chromate, which is not a pesticide, but a pigment, and is not normally a part of turmeric. Moreover, though some of the contaminated turmeric was contaminated by mega-corporations, much of it was not.

Your family is from Bangladesh, aren't they?

The X-ray fluorescence tests used in the market spectacle described in the article are very cheap and easy, but they require equipment that is very expensive from the perspective of your average Bangladesh greengrocer. There are other easy and cheap tests for heavy metals that don't require such expensive equipment, but they only work if the metal ions are water-soluble, which lead chromate isn't.

Em, because it was the farmers who were painting their turmeric with lead paint to make their whole turmeric look more appealing, not "mega-corporations."

It would be super cheap to pop a teaspoon in an envelope and post it to a government test lab who has an xrf gun...

The article specifically rules out lead from pesticides

> Perhaps the lead came from agricultural pesticides? "We sampled hundreds of agrochemicals. Did not find lead in them," Forsyth says.

Lead chromate was deliberately added after harvesting to make it more yellow

Yeah, and probably in, say, Switzerland that's exactly what people would do if they had this problem. But here in Argentina, for example, a friend of mine had his house raided by the police because he revealed that the voting machines the country was planning to adopt were flawed and vulnerable to falsified election results. And in the US right now immigrants are getting arrested and deported if they show up to their court hearings to decide whether they should be deported. And you probably remember that, during the covid pandemic, the US government was prohibiting labs from telling people whether their covid tests were positive or negative. So probably this isn't a full replacement for being able to do your own tests.

Uh, the culprit isn't turmeric, it's lead chromate that farmers were putting on turmeric.

For most readers of English, it is not an expected fact that someone would be intentionally adding lead to food.

In the article, the turmeric related lead poisonings were due to turmeric bought at Bangladeshi markets, not processed, packaged spices bought from a grocer.

> the US government was prohibiting labs from telling people whether their covid tests were positive or negative.

Are you referring to unvetted experimental tests, or something else?

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/09/politics/coronavirus-testing-...

I asked my Bengali friend, who grew up in a lower-class family in rural Bangladesh. This is something he learned about in schools in the 90's. The test isn't easily available, but it's not like this is a surprise to the Bangladeshi community.

The analogy would be if someone came to the US, found salmonella on some produce, and wrote some breathless article about how they found the 'culprit'. This is business as usual masquerading as a longform news piece.

But for anyone who knows the Bangladeshi community this isn't a surprise at all. Neither the source nor the way it wakes its way into immigrants diets. Every time my Bengali friends visit Bangladesh they take an empty suitcase to fill with spices, sweets, and the like. The adulteration has been going on for decades.

I feel like the article should have been written from that perspective- an outsider discovering how a different community operates and polices itself- instead of from the perspective of some Western saviors uncovering a new problem.

Yes. I lived there until I was five. Even at that age you learn not to see other people as human. You kind of have to—people do things like cut off kids’ hands to make them more effective at begging.[1] You walk through the street with amputees coming up to you.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jul/31/india.randeepr...

I quite hated it. Very poorly written article with no greys

Specifically what I'm talking about was this, from my bookmarks file, which is mentioned in your CNN story:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de... #news from March 10, 02020 how Helen Chu at the University of Washington discovered that covid had spread to #USA. She was running the Seattle Flu Study, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in association with the Washington State Department of Health, whose state epidemiologist Dr. Scott Lindquist requested her to test for #covid, but was blocked by the FDA from telling the people who had it, because “the group was not certified to provide test results to anyone outside of their own investigators.” The FDA's repeated refusal was “because the lab was not certified as a clinical laboratory [just a research laboratory, which has much higher standards] under regulations established by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a process that could take months.”

The CDC was also trying to develop tests, but the tests they shipped were defective. Meanwhile the Seattle Flu Study sequenced the genome of the virus and discovered that a new variant had arisen. All of this was in late February.

> On March 2, the Seattle Flu Study’s institutional review board at the University of Washington determined that it would be unethical for the researchers not to test and report the results in a public health emergency, Dr. Starita said. Since then, her laboratory has found and reported numerous additional cases, all of which have been confirmed.

But then:

> on Monday night [presumably March 8], state regulators, enforcing Medicare rules, stepped in and again told them to stop until they could finish getting certified as a clinical laboratory, a process that could take many weeks.

Describing this as "unvetted experimental tests" is in some sense technically correct, but it's like describing me checking the voltage at a test point in my power supply with my multimeter as an "unvetted experimental test". Nobody has vetted my test plan, my multimeter may be out of calibration, and I might even not be checking circuit node I think I'm checking.

But if you think that's a valid criticism of what I'm doing, you need to be locked up where you can't harm others.

The main difference is that Helen Chu is the Allergy and Infectious Disease Program Lead at an R1 university, and literally the person who discovered that covid had spread to the US, while I'm not the lead of anything, and nobody will die if I don't find out why this power supply doesn't work until next week, so I don't have an IRB telling me that it's my ethical obligation to measure that test point.

The Trump Administration's handled the covid pandemic like a fucking bunch of clowns, but the CDC and FDA are mostly civil service, and most of the numbskulls who did this are career civil servants, not political appointees.

The US government is a motherfucking glioblastoma of incompetence, and that seriously interferes with well-intentioned, sensible plans like the one proposed by londons_explore.

I'm from the US, but I at least vaguely follow food safety. The idea that this poisoning was a surprise is bizarre. It was the absolute first thing I thought of. It is the most common form of corruption. Similar thing just exploded in china with a red dye for children's school food. Like EV olive oil, salmon, and honey a majority of the food is adulterated. You just hope that it's non-toxic.

The real issue is a complete lack of testing or regulation, and I fear soon a loss of "rule of law" in the US. I mean if you bought the right person and airplane or some meme-coin, I'm pretty sure you could sell melamine in baby formula or lead paint in junk food, and it would be blamed on "those damn furriners"!

Eh? Adulteration has been going on for decades, yet your friends deliberately pack light so they can bring back those contaminated spices?

Cognitive dissonance is a thing, yes. Would you also be surprised to know that some Americans smoke and don't use seatbelts?

Not every immigrant is a twenty something working on a Masters degree or working in the tech industry. Most of the Bengalis I know, especially in the NYC area, are here by sheer luck and determination moreso than formal education. The older ones have survived famine, cyclones, and literal genocide. At that point, trying to convince someone that their favorite spices or sweets that they grew up with for 40+ years may be harmful is pretty difficult.

If anything, getting to know the immigrant community has been enlightening in pointing out my own biases. It's easy to point the finger at someone else because they're a fish out of water. But put me in a different culture (or really just let time pass with the attendant changes in culture and technology) and the same thing would be true for me.