The study looked at what the effects on the population were, and how they were modified by demographic factors etc., not the unsurprising fact that there were health effects. But you knew that, right?
How common is the use of water purifiers in the West? Here in India, in my observation, most middle class and above families own a household water filter of some sort (electrical or otherwise) and routinely fill up bottles for drinking purposes. Drinking straight from the tap is something very uncommon.
It will vary by household and with 330M people you will be able to find a group doing anything you can imagine so beware folks trying to prescribe their lives experience as representative of Americans in general.
In my household we do not trust the tap and would never drink from it directly. We have something called hard water here and came here from New Mexico where our tap was frequently brown. Both were “safe” to drink, but we choose to drink neither directly.
We buy 20 ounce water bottles from the grocery store which are filled from the “local” spring. We keep a Brita water filter pitcher in our fridge that we fill out of the tap and replace the filter on regularly. Generally we each open a new bottle in the morning and then refill it from the brita filter for the remainder of the day.
San Francisco gets its water from Hetch Hetchy, it follows an almost entirely pristine granite pathway from the reservoir to the city. Moved here from Chicago, a city directly abutting the largest freshwater lakes in the world.
I drink directly from the tap, and grew up trusting my access to water. Now, I'm aware that not everyone has that privilege and our government, increasingly neoliberal and enamored with privatization and fracking, has allowed the public freshwater infrastructure to degrade in various parts of the country that didn't previously have problems with their tap water.
It's one of the first questions I ask when I visit someone else now. It's probably the greatest modern civilizational decline.
It depends on a country. A lot of people think that just because it's from a bottle, it's safer. In many countries,the quality of bottled water isn't regulated,or not regulated as much as the tap water. I lived in 4 different countries in Europe and always drank tap water.My own country is one of few in the world, where tap water is supplied pretty much exclusively from underground sources,so no purified river/lake water.
A lot of people mention Brita filters, which is an activated carbon filter, however a lot of households would probably benefit more from limescale filters.
In Michigan drinking from the tap is pretty universal, unless you live in a rural area with a well. Being in the middle of a couple large freshwater lakes gives you delicious water.
That said, water purification is big business. People have filtered water pitchers (think Brita) or large units that supply the whole house (Culligan)
The most well-known filter brand in the US is Brita which is a pitcher you buy with a replaceable filter. Costs around $20 per filter which last "2-6 months". Probably an order of magnitude more expensive than what you pay in India. It's definitely as a very middle-class thing in US; and to the extent it removes minerals and flouride from the water its arguably detrimental (tap water is generally trusted to be safe.)
Oddly, I recall that the "workaround" solution being to the Flint crisis was to ship in tons of bottled water. Cheap filters, if they remove lead and bacteria fully, would seem like a much more cost effective way.
I'm not sure what the West is, but I live in eastern europe and I have no idea what an electric purifier would even look like. Someone might order bottled water at a restaurant, but I'm pretty sure everyone drinks tap at home.
From what I've seen Germans seems pretty suspicious of their tap water(or maybe just hard water?) and use brita filters a lot. There is no actual health benefit or harm avoidance for using them as far as I understand.
These claim to use RO, UV etc. for purifying the water. I am kind of surprised that the Amazon USA listings for water purifiers return several fad-ish "gadget" things first, instead of the above.
I won't name my city (in the South East US), but we have high quality water. I have zero problem drinking from the tap. In fact, I would probably move if I had to use a filter.
I'd imagine it varies from country to country and by locality a bit, but I've lived in Australia and several spots in the US; at each tap water was routinely drunk.
I'm sure many municipalities in the US offer it but if you live in New York City, the city is happy to ship you a kit to check the lead levels in your residence for free. There's even a map that shows you where the lead-based water lines are. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dep/water/monitoring-for-lead.page
>Since state austerity policies initiated a potable water crisis seven years ago in Flint, Michigan, public health monitoring has focused on potential developmental deficits associated with lead exposure in adolescents or fetuses exposed in utero.
Here, we have the rare headline that actually undersells the story the body is telling. Wouldn't hurt to change the title to highlight the developmental issues the scientists are investigating.
Well. I think the developmental deficits are an already told story. What's "new" is study of adults showing they're also affected. It's kind of a "duh" thing, i.e. most people wouldn't be cool with drinking heavily lead tainted water, even if it's "less harmful" in adults or whatever. But the story here is that they studied it, and lo, the conventional wisdom that it doesn't harm adults doesn't pan out. Turns out poisoning a city is bad for its inhabitants.
I'm slightly regretting the moralizing tone here, but this is a case where it just seems obscene to me that we as a society didn't act effectively to intervene here. This was entirely mitigable, given adequate resources and attention. It's a horror show.
This did boil down to where the problem mostly wasn't with the supply, right? That is, the problem was with lead pipes from the water meter to the houses/apartments? Not excusing everything the city did wrong, but I can see why that would have complicated everything and made resolution such a long process.
> This precipitated the tragic decision in 2013 to end the city’s five-decade practice of piping treated water for its residents from Detroit in favor of a cheaper alternative: temporarily pumping water from the Flint River until a new water pipeline from Lake Huron was built. Although the river water was highly corrosive, Flint officials failed to treat it, and lead leached out from aging pipes into thousands of homes.
> The documents falsely claim that the city had tested tap water from homes with lead service lines, and therefore the highest lead-poisoning risks; however, the city did not know the locations of lead service lines, which city officials acknowledged in November 2015 after the Flint Journal/MLive published an article revealing the practice, using documents obtained under the Michigan Freedom of Information Act. The Journal/MLive reported that the city had "disregarded federal rules requiring it to seek out homes with lead plumbing for testing, potentially leading the city and state to underestimate for months the extent of toxic lead leaching into Flint's tap water."
To expand on this a bit more, the corrosive water they swapped to permanently stripped off the inner coating (that I think was just mineral build up?) from the lead pipes, so now they leach endlessly. Most cities will have lead pipes somewhere in the water supply network. This situation is definitely entirely the city’s fault.
My understanding is the lead pipes over many many years had an internal coating of biofilm and minerals that happens in all plumbing systems. The biofilm and mineral coating protected the water from lead contamination, it created a liner so to speak.
Then Flint decided to save money by changing water sources from Lake Huron to the Flint river which changed many properties of the water including ph. This relatively abrupt change caused the biofilm and mineral coating to weaken and expose the lead of the pipes to the water.
So are lead pipes at fault or the sudden change in water chemistry? Water chemistry changes are well know to cause these issues, the water quality chemist in most jurisdictions will be aware of the potential issues, not sure if they were ignored.
IMO the pipes should have been changed out long ago, but that doesn't absolve the decision makers from the issues caused by changing water sources to save money without consideration for the side effects.
It was the supply switch in combination with the state of the pipes. I believe the switch of the supply caused a layer of calcium coating the inside of the lead pipes to dissolve due to a different chemical makeup, leading to water then being exposed to lead. Had they not switched on the first place, they would have been ‘ok’. Not great for sure but they would have had time to deal with it. Which they probably wouldn’t have had money to..
I read that the ancient Romans also used lead pipes. They too knew it had horrific health effects, and they used it anyway: lead is cheap, and the government was corrupt. Plus ça change...
> Despite the Romans' common use of lead pipes, their aqueducts rarely poisoned people. Unlike other parts of the world where lead pipes cause poisoning, the Roman water had so much calcium in it that a layer of plaque prevented the water contacting the lead itself. What often causes confusion is the large amount of evidence of widespread lead poisoning, particularly amongst those who would have had easy access to piped water, an unfortunate result of lead being used in cookware and as an additive to processed food and drink (for example as a preservative in wine).
