[kragen]

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.

[londons_explore]

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...

[kragen]

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.

[gowld]

> 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-...

[kragen]

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.