Sanitation and water treatment

Assembled from 19 blocks · 3 evidence · 9 related

1. Story
2. The combination of piped clean water, sewerage separated from drinking supply, sand filtration and — from around 1908 in the United States — chlorination, together with refuse removal and housing regulation. It is the largest single contributor to the modern mortality decline and it arrived largely before germ theory was accepted: Edwin Chadwick's 1842 sanitary report argued from mortality statistics while holding the wrong mechanism, miasma, and prescribed exactly the right remedy. Cutler and Miller's analysis of major United States cities between 1900 and 1936 attributes roughly half of the total mortality decline, and a substantially larger share of the infant mortality decline, to clean water technologies alone. The intervention is unglamorous, municipal, capital-intensive and almost entirely invisible in popular longevity discourse, which is a reasonable measure of how badly that discourse is calibrated.
3. Knowledge
4. The collapse of infant and child mortality
5. Sanitation and water treatment
6. Connections
7. Edwin Chadwick
8. The rise in life expectancy at birth
9. The collapse of infant and child mortality
10. John Snow
11. The Broad Street pump handle is removed
12. Routine chlorination of a municipal water supply begins in the United States
13. The rise in life expectancy at birth
14. Sanitation and water treatment
15. Routine chlorination of a municipal water supply begins in the United States
16. Evidence
17. Supports the claim that sanitary reform was argued from mortality statistics before germ theory, on an incorrect (miasmatic) mechanism. V55 verification basis: the report was not consulted in this session.
18. Supports the attribution of roughly half the urban mortality decline in major United States cities between 1900 and 1936 to clean water technologies. V55 verification basis: not retrieved; the exact percentages and their confidence intervals are unchecked and the headline figure is quoted approximately for that reason.
19. Supports the waterborne-transmission argument, the Broad Street investigation and the South London water-supply comparison. V55 verification basis: not consulted in this session; the 8 September 1854 handle-removal date comes from the standard secondary account rather than from the monograph.