Clean Water is Health Care

My understanding is that there are "two Chicagos." If you are in a predominantly White neighborhood, it's probably comfortably middle class or better and has no lead pipes. If you are in a predominantly non-white neighborhood, it's probably poor and probably has lead pipes.

Why Did We Ever Use Lead Pipes?

Softness, malleability, and durability

Lead pipes were used in water systems due to their softness, malleability, and durability. These properties allowed for easy shaping and bending of the pipes, making them suitable for connecting water mains to user premises. The low melting point of lead made it easy to shape and install, and the corrosion resistance of lead pipes made them a reliable choice for underground water distribution. Despite the health risks, lead pipes were widely used in the late 1800s and early 1900s due to their cost-effectiveness and the lack of understanding of lead poisoning at the time. The use of lead pipes was a pragmatic decision that prioritized utility and cost over safety, leading to significant health consequences in the long run. 

6 sources 

Water.org exists because the current very common practice in Africa of carrying water from elsewhere that's untreated actively fosters serious health issues. Years ago, I watched a thirty minute video about the origin story.

The founder went to Africa on a medical mission and ultimately concluded that most of the health problems they were treating were caused by lack of access to clean water. So he started a nonprofit micro loan program to try to stop the problem at the source. 

Why America is incapable of deciding that we should get our water infrastructure problems resolved, I don't know. Too busy helping our corrupt president make his children wealthier with unpopular wars, I guess.

If you care about the rights and welfare of Black Americans or something like that, let me suggest that getting the lead pipes replaced wouldn't be a bad idea.

Here's a little bit of information about water infrastructure and health stuff and my writing about Very Basic Water Infrastructure elsewhere.

1. Pseudomonas Aeruginosa (PA)

https://atypicalcysticfibrosis.blogspot.com/search/label/Pseudomonas.Aeruginosa

As far as I know,  this is not a water infrastructure issue -- though it is in 1 in 6 bottles of bottled water in the US, so I don't typically drink bottled water -- but it will still be an issue for many people in underdeveloped areas because it's EVERYWHERE. 

It's literally in the dirt. While it's not infectious for healthy people, if you have HIV, cancer, diabetes, pregnancy or some other serious medical issue, you probably have it as an infection. 

My best understanding is you should get picky about germ control, especially with regards to food. My condition is on that list and I believe PA is a factor in what my family long ago dubbed Toxic Mouth Syndrome where cups and stuff seemed just evil after we drank out of them.

We use disposable cups, set up everything for a meal or snack BEFORE anyone takes a bite, promptly wash up afterwards and promptly remove the trash. That's the single biggest thing we do to control what we dubbed Toxic Mouth Syndrome. Getting adequate zinc also helps.

I'm reasonably confident that a good guess is zinc supplementation following covid would be a good thing, BUT to be sure you could take a medical history, ask if they had covid, see if malaria got WORSE after covid. If yes, supplement zinc and see if that helps.

My belief is getting adequate zinc helps with all iron loving bugs, including PA. If you are a physician, maybe look for studies or do one. I don't need a study to decide to act on that as an individual, but if you value your medical license, you are not similarly free to do as you please.

PA and HIV are found together. PA loves iron, thus causes anemia and this fosters HIV. Treating PA probably is treating HIV because iron apparently poisons HIV is my impression from stuff I've read.

So inadequate access to clean water fosters serious medical issues and serious medical issues faster PA infections and PA is everywhere. So I'm pretty sure lack of adequate water infrastructure leads to PA infections down the road.

And metal poisoning promotes infection. FYI: Lead pipes cause metal poisoning, in case that needs to be said. Also fosters stunting, but mentioning that lifelong debilitating problem is no doubt quibbling.

2. Legionella 

There's a post on this site with some information about symptoms and treatment. It's strongly associated with water infrastructure and stagnant pools of water and the name originates from it first being identified due to an outbreak at an American Legion convention involving the AC equipment.

This gets into biofilm (nasty slick coating) inside poorly maintained water pipes, mostly in poorer parts of the US. It can also grow in hot water heaters and air conditioners (which tend to drip condensed water). 

Legionella is best known as the cause of Legionnaires' disease, but it also causes Pontiac Fever. Legionaires' disease can be deadly. Pontiac fever is a chronic condition that isn't typically deadly. Basically you have chronic respiratory issues, like a cough and frequent sneezing, without it becoming a life threatening illness.

If you are doing development in very rural conditions, RUNNING water from streams has more oxygen content and this causes a lower microbial load. Stagnant water is associated with disease generally.

That doesn't mean it's safe to drink without treatment. It means it's probably easier to treat it and get it clean enough for human consumption.

Some of what I have written about on Eclogiselle slows water in wadis so they become intermittent streams that are wet stream beds more often than dry. This is done in part by forcing water underground in sandy areas, which SHOULD help provide natural filtration and thereby help clean the water and reduce risks and reduce how much it needs to be treated to make it potable (fit for human consumption).

My understanding is Legionella is a primary reason the US established water treatment standards or a primary thing we are trying to treat for in water treatment plants, so I'm hoping that practices like tree urinals and latrines etc. reduce the risk of this becoming a widespread infrastructure issue in very underdeveloped places should they adopt my ideas.

If you are doing development someplace where having ANY water is a big improvement: If you are using it for crops, you shouldn't need to worry too much about water treatment assuming your source is reasonably clean.

My goal is to introduce water infrastructure that's affordable and sustainable and unlikely to create first world problems that poor people with limited education have no real hope of remediating. 

That's not a slam on them. The US can't get this adequately under control and we are supposedly a rich and powerful country.

Legionella is currently in all 50 US states. It's not a matter of IF. It's a matter of how bad.

I'm not interested in promoting practices in very underdeveloped areas that introduce first world problems like legionella in under maintained lead pipes when they don't have the means to fix that.

Some parts of the US look like third world countries and it's a running not funny joke to talk about the third world country of America. So I'm not necessarily talking about foreign countries here.

Which brings me to point 3:

3. Lead pipes.

I'm hoping what I'm introducing is both inexpensive AND not a "lead pipe" type solution. We have outlawed these but they are still found in older, poorer areas and are not being adequately aggressively replaced. 

As noted above, lead pipes were cheap and easier to work with, so they were commonly installed in new construction at one time in the US. But it causes lead poisoning which is extremely debilitating. 

I'm an environmental studies major and I've tried hard to write up ideas that are cheap to implement and safe in spite of being low cost and hopefully not leading to unavoidable and hard to fix problems down the line. 

(Do keep in mind that ALL infrastructure requires SOME maintenance. But maintaining tree urinals should not be on par with maintaining modern water pipes and the like.)

In Bangladesh (you also see it in Pakistan and other places, but Bangladesh is where it's so bad they compare it to Chernobyl), aid organizations dug a bunch of wells because a quarter million people a year were dying from disease from collecting rain water and surface waters. Some percentage of those wells were drawing from a rock layer rich in gold and arsenic which tend to be found together. 

I wrote two college papers on it and it was characterized in the news as a worse disaster than Chernobyl without anyone really acknowledging that it did, in fact, dramatically reduce annual deaths from preventable disease.

So after achieving their goal of dramatically reducing deaths from disease from collecting surface water, no one like thanked them for replacing that problem with arsenic poisoning which at least kills you slower. No, it gets remembered as a worse problem than Chernobyl.

So my posts have some guidelines for generally sourcing water from uphill, directing waste downhill and away from you and making distinctions between water clean enough to drink and use in cooking and water clean enough for other uses.

If you use my writing, it's possible -- probable, in fact -- that somewhere down the line you will discover some problem you have in some cases because of where the water is from or something like that -- the way they did in Bangladesh after -- ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED! -- they built a bunch of wells only to be told "You rat bastards are POISONING us!!!". 

But if you are following my instructions, you shouldn't be installing anything like lead pipes or digging wells into arsenic-laden rock layers. Hopefully, it's something less likely to be compared to Chernobyl. 

And, again, if you are someplace like Chicago and care about health and blah blah blah: REMOVING the lead pipes and updating that throughout the area would be a smart thing to do.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and most American physicians neither look for metal poisoning nor know how to effectively treat it. You could probably do a paper showing replacing those pipes is a pittance compared to what they are costing this country. 

The problem is extracting funds and permission from the White people in the nice neighborhoods who have the money and do most of the gatekeeping.

4. Schistosomiasis 

Also known as snail fever, this is found in Africa, Asia and South America. Improving water infrastructure should reduce incidence of this disease.

Methods of preventing the disease include improving access to clean water and reducing the number of snails.

I know about this from reading up on the Aswan Dam, which met all of its stated goals, like providing electricity, but had unintended consequences that some sources suggest make it overall a disastrous project.

Egypt is called the Jewel of the Nile and its annual flooding supported agriculture for thousands of years by providing irrigation and an influx of fertile soils in the form of silt. The dam stopped the flooding and this had the following two negative impacts (among other things -- I could do an entire paper on the Aswan Dam):

1. Use of chemical fertilizer skyrocketed.

This has knock on effects like worse health and more expensive food. This is a not insignificant consequence for the health and material welfare and prosperity of the people.

2. Incidence of schistosomiasis also skyrocketed because the inconvenient, icky flooding not only provided FREE fertilizer, it kept snail populations under control.

What I read is that schistosomiasis is frequently caught by poor people without shoes stepping on a snail in the muddy waterways that were no longer being cleared out annually, breaking the shell and getting cut by the broken shell. The cut plus the crushed snail introduces the parasite because the snails are a vector.

If you are someplace where this is an issue, watch out for snails while building water infrastructure and take precautions like wearing shoes if stepping in muddy water in the process of building water infrastructure. 

Theoretically, this disease should become less common with installing infrastructure, but I don't currently have any data on that.

5. Local Water Treatment 

I have messy, brain dump notes on r/Gaza2050 for tentative local water treatment STARTING with copper and peroxide and ending with filtration. This potentially results in excess consumption of copper but copper is actually an essential nutrient, unlike lead which is a poison. 

I later added a post about this method to Eclogiselle and later found information on local waste water treatment for industrial waste water.

This is pertinent if you are off grid in the US. I'm an Environmental Resource Management major AND I have a deadly medical condition. Germ control is my life.

And to the best of my knowledge, there are currently NO affordable off grid filtration systems that solve the issue of also killing germs. I wrote about that on Eclogiselle a few months back.