[trhway]

During my elementary school years (beginning of 198x USSR) the lead was a go to material for a lot of things - using campfires we melted the lead out of Navy cables and batteries (from the Navy dumps), no gloves, no masks, and made a lot of things out of it - toy action figures/soldiers for example, weights and weighted hooks for fishing, bullets for DYI guns, gear for some games, etc. (I'm a drop-out from PhD. program at a top Russian Math school - didn't see money in it and thus went into programming, so i guess the few IQ points i lost due to lead (i score usually about 130) is what caused such poor judgement :)

[foldr]

None of those activities pose the same risks as soldering using leaded solder, for the reasons given above. You are unlikely to end up ingesting significant quantities of the lead.

It's probably worth emphasizing that this is risk with home soldering, where you're likely to eat and solder in relatively close proximity, and without being completely rigorous about changing your clothes and vacuuming up every last spec of dust.

Lead free solder works fine, so there is really no reason to take even a small risk if you are soldering as a hobbyist.

(And yeah, it's probably a small risk. By all means use leaded solder if you think the slight additional convenience outweighs the small risk of significant lead exposure.)

[trhway]

During 6 and 7 grade i was at electronics hobby club where beside soldering of new stuff we also did a bunch of desoldering too as the main source of electronics components where the PCBs pulled out from the pieces of missiles/torpedoes/etc at the Navy dumps. There was no any "safe handling" procedures wrt. lead. Granted though that washing hands before eating has been ingrained in me (and as far as i saw - in my friends too) from the early childhood.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not arguing about un-safety of lead. I'm just wondering how things can be different when one knows vs. when one doesn't know. Statistically speaking a bunch of people i knew though the childhood/school should have some lead damage. Many of them went to become military/Navy officers (growing on a Navy base biases your choice that way, i also did an attempt to go to military officers college). As my childhood was pretty typical for that time in USSR, I wonder what systemic effect missing few IQ points by a large number of people can have.

[foldr]

I'm not quite sure what your point is. Of course we know that people can do lots of soldering using leaded solder and not suffer any obvious harm. It's not an enormously risky activity. It just seems pointless to take the risk when you don't have to.