Use of lead water pipes

Lead incorporated into the body can have severe effects on the kidneys and the nervous system. Over time, an excess amount of lead leads to a decline of health and to neurological disruptions. It is thought that one of the contributing causes to the decline of the Roman Empire was the widespread use of lead water pipes among the upper classes. Over time, the ruling classes became less able to rule, less vigorous, and the civilization declined. 

Why was R. J. Thomas so reluctant to admit Lowell s use of lead water pipes had been a mistake Although it is impossible now to go... 

This chapter has shown that under nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century legal institutions, consumers assumed all financial and personal liability stemming from the use of lead water pipes. This was true even though water suppliers were the lost-cost providers of water-lead... 

The second force shaping the use of lead water pipes was ideology. The construction of urban water systems was often tied to ideas about the appropriate role of local governments in some areas of economic activity, notably public utilities such as water, gas, and electric. The proponents of municipal socialism argued that these activities could not be left in the hands of profiteering capitalists because they could not be trusted to make public health and the broader welfare of city residents their top priority. In Glasgow, municipal socialists used the newly constructed Loch Katrine waterworks as the quintessential example of what their movement could accomplish, and this pride undermined their ability to admit that the new water system was prone to leach lead, even though the problem could have been fixed for a pittance (see chapter 8). 

The third and final force was the law. Throughout the nineteenth century, courts in England and the United States refused to hold urban water providers, whether publicly or privately owned, liable for any harm that might have resulted from the use of lead water pipes. Because the courts held homeowners liable for damages, there were limited incentives for public water providers to adopt measures protecting consumers from lead exposure related to service pipes, and household plumbing more generally (see chapter 7). 

The limit for the concentration of lead ions in drinking water is 50 ppb (p,g dm ). A survey in 1990 found that the first draw of water from the taps of a significant proportion of homes in the UK exceeded this limit, mainly because of the use of lead for pipes, or solder, in areas where the water is relatively acidic. It is a good idea not to drink the water that has been standing overnight in an older plumbing system, until you have run out the water for at least a minute. 

Does the use of copper water pipes ensure that your household water is free from lead ... 

There are also many questions surrounding the how and why of lead water pipes. What prompted city officials in Cape Town, and most other large cities, to use lead water pipes in the first place Were alternative piping materials such as iron or cement-line pipe that much more expensive or otherwise unattractive Were public officials unaware of the dangers of lead Was the scientific and medical literature on lead so underdeveloped that one could not predict that lead water pipes could... 

Third, the decision by public authorities to install lead pipes, and to continue to use them despite serious public health consequences, resulted from a complex interplay of social forces and scientific conventions. For human societies to adapt and respond to environmental problems in constructive ways, they first need to be aware that there is a problem. The difficulty for those concerned with lead contaminated water supplies is that historically such awareness was limited (though certainly not entirely absent). As explained in later chapters, officials in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used the health of adults and older children to assess the effects and dangers of lead water pipes. Simply put, if many... 

Like Joseph Gallagher s paper on the safety of lead water pipes, the Ellet-Reese affair illustrates how difficult it must have been for consumers to acquire safe and reliable advice. Who should consumers have believed. Dr. William H. Ellet, whose financial coimection to the CSW company was no secret, or Dr. Meredith Reese, whose own partisanship and prejudice recognized few bounds That CSW eventually went out of business, and that New York City continued to use lead pipes well into the twentieth century, suggests most historical actors fovmd Dr. Reese the more reliable source of information. 

The second strategy explores the correlation between the use of lead service pipes and infectious disease rates. If it were a lack of health consciousness, and not lead water pipes per se, that drove up infant death rates in towns with lead water lines, one would expect to observe a positive correlation between the use of lead water lines and infectious diseases such as scarlet fever, measles, and the like. A positive relationship between lead use and infectious disease might also reflect the fact that exposure to unhealthy lead levels at a young age left children weak and compromised in terms of their ability to fight off infectious diseases. Hence, a positive relationship between lead use and infectious disease rates does not, by itself, prove that it was a lack of health consciousness that caused the elevated rates of infant death in towns with lead lines. However, a negative coefficient, or a very small positive one, on the lead dummy would certainly undermine the case for health consciousness. 

That lead water lines had no discernible or systematic effect on the mortality rates of older children is consistent with the idea that only the youngest and least-developed children were vulnerable to fatal lead poisoning. If the use of lead water lines per se was not vmdermining the health of young children, but was instead correlated with some unobserved variable called health consciousness, one wonders why the large and strong correlation between lead pipes and childhood mortality ceases to exist after children reach two years of age. 

A series of ecological regressions using data from Massachusetts in 1915 failed to identify consistent findings regarding the effects of lead water pipes on fertility. 

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