When I was young, my brother's friend invited us over for dinner to have some ducks they shot. I found lead pellets in the meat and their reply was, "oh, we missed those but don't worry about it.. just spit it our or if you ingest one you'll poop it out later". I never ate duck after that since I didn't want to look for the lead pellets like some people don't like looking for fish bones. Here we are today and I haven't heard of any problem with that family regarding lead poisoning. Maybe the old duck hunters can chime in?
You have to understand that the vast majority of people who experience any sort of lead toxicity issues (regardless of the cause) will go undiagnosed, with the possible exception of children or extremely acute cases. In most people, low levels of exposure will accumulate over years. In adult humans, the changes are so slow or incremental of often go unnoticed in terms of cause and effect as the person continually adjusts to a new norm. This is partially because the symptoms are largely non-diagnostic. For example, say you have come into your 50s and are hypertensive and and chronic low level joint paint, particularly in your feet, knees, hips, and/or shoulders. Would think you think you had lead poisoning or would you think you are just getting old? What about that incremental hearing loss? Too much rock-n-roll as a young person or lead poisoning? Reduced sperm count? Again, age-related or lead-related...assuming you even had it tested as this is something you would not actually recognize empirically yourself. Do you find yourself getting more forgetful? Maybe you can no longer remember pi carried out to 25 places like you could back in high school. Do you chalk that up to age again, or lead poisoning? Maybe you are 70 years old with notable mental detractions. Old people may deteriorate mentally for a number of reasons and it is considered rather normal, right? Or, is it due to lead? How about headaches? Everybody gets those. Ever thought they might be due to lead? Fatigue...now that you are in your 50s, do you find that you just don't have the same drive and stamina that you had 20 years ago? Must just be that you have gotten older and are "slowing down," right? Maybe you are slowing down because of lead toxiity.
Maybe you start feeding your little children lead tainted meat and they grow into "normal" adults and you say to yourself, "See, eating meat with lead in it didn't negatively impact my children" only your kids have IQs around 95 instead of 125 that they would have had if they hadn't had the lead exposure. So sure, they are still perfectly functional in society, but they never achieved their actual potential.
Maybe your wife had a couple of miscarriages when y'all were trying to have kids. What are the chances you got her tested for lead toxicity? Unless your wife worked in certain industries or that there were already documented cases of lead issues in your family or documented for your community (e.g., Flint, MI), lead is probably going to be one of the last things doctors look for as being the cause of the problem.
Maybe your wife gave birth to a significantly mentally underdeveloped child and at that point y'all figure you probably shouldn't have any more children and never paid the money for a tox screen or genetic testing to determine the actual cause. How would you know it was lead?
Do you have gut troubles? Do you maybe sometimes have an upset stomach that you simply treat with OTC products, maybe more so than when you were younger? How about constipation? We all know older folks are more prone to this, but do we really ask ourselves why? Both of these are symptoms of increased lead levels.
The point here is that unless you have have significant changes in your health over a very short period of time as from acute poisoning, there is a very good chance that you will overlook or the doctors will overlook these issues as being caused by lead toxicity over a long period of time.
) that lead in woodcock bones can come from two sources (as per the isotopic analysis in your linked study)
