How Important is Plumbing?
Radio interview on health aspects of plumbing.
The main causes of the health problems are the micro-organisms – the pathogens that cause disease or the chemicals that make their way into the system. The micro-organisms can be bacteria, they can be viruses that can be protozoa, most of them lead to diarrhoeal diseases or diseases related to diarrhoea. The chemicals can be many and various. They can be linked to diseases like cancer, lead, and cause reduction in IQ attainment. The hazards can also be things like hot water, scolding especially in elderly and the very young. Although those are the actually the cause the adverse health effects – they are not really the cause of the problem. The real cause of the problems are failures in the plumbing systems that lead to contaminated water being drawn into what ought to be safe supplies. Very often this arises because of simple problems. Things like backsiphonage where dirty water is sucked back into the clean water system; cross connections; simple errors in plumbing that need not occur. Leakage in drainage, contamination of domestic tanks. The key thing about all these problems is they can be prevented, and prevention is far cheaper than cure and contributes more to preventing disease and promoting health.
Good plumbing is one of the key building blocks in protecting and promoting health. If a system that provides water through a house or through a dwelling or in a public building is designed, built and managed properly is critical in ensuring the health of individuals that live and work there. In the developed world we see very clearly that as other causes of water related disease are progressively controlled so the importance of plumbing is increasingly seen in outbreaks of disease. Many of those outbreaks are very small and may not be detected. The kinds of diseases most frequently are diarrhoeal disease but also outbreaks of legionellosis, disease caused by different viruses, and poisonings because of substances like lead that makes itself into water from the plumbing system itself. And we see injuries like scolding. The important thing is that plumbing is the solution to those problems; its not a health risk in itself.
Plumbing was important to health yesterday. It is important to health today and will be even more important tomorrow. If we look back at history we see that simple actions on simple plumbing errors are often protected public health. In some of the first reports of what we would now describe as public health action in the industrialized countries in the mid 19th century in Europe. Simple measure such as cutting unsafe pumps and wells made real impacts on preventive then massive outbreaks of disease like cholera. Today if we look at the statistics from the countries good outbreak investigation we see an increasing proportion of disease outbreak that arise because of problems in distribution systems, and domestic plumbing. That occurs because we are progressively fixing other areas of concern so this is now coming to the fore. In the developing world we see that same pattern as we progressively tackle other causes of pollution, other failures in our systems for delivering safe water especially those systems that target relatively disadvantaged populations so the importance of plumbing being brought ever further to the fore.Dr Jamie Bartram
Coordinator, Water, Sanitation and Health
World Health Organization