REMEDIATING INFRASTRUCTURAL RACISM:

High on this list is a proposed $111 billion injection of funds into projects designed to address the needs of municipal water systems. The most concrete chunk of that is an ambitious $45 billion investment in eliminating lead pipes. But there's also a mix of grants and loans to address other water systems and clean water needs, including a $10 billion program to address something called PFAS.

The case for an infusion of funds into this area strikes me as very compelling. [...

And it seems that people have been broadly aware of the health risks associated with lead for a long time. Here's an article that ran in the British Medical Journal by Alfred Swann back in 1889:

It has fallen to my lot to observe many cases of plumbism, and its relation to sterility and abortion only touches the very fringe of a vast subject. The influence of lead on the nervous, vascular, muscular, lymphatic, and digestive systems merits greater consideration than has hitherto been devoted to it.

To suppose that plumbism means only wrist-drop and paralysis of the extensors of the forearms seems to me to be illogical. I believe that in plumbism, neuritis is not confined to any particular set of nerves. Is not lead colic due to paralysis of the nerves regulating the muscular coats of the intestines? What is the meaning in cases of lead-poisoning of the tense pulse, the liability to epileptiform seizure, to cerebral and other haemorrhages, to gout and uric acid, and to albuminuria and rheumatic pains? Surely these point to both nervous, vascular, and metabolic derangements which open up a wide field of inquiry for those who are interested in our food and water supply, and in public health generally.

Well, we probably should have listened to Alfred Swann! Instead, in the United States, we kept putting lead pipes everywhere for a generation. Starting in the 1920s you had pushback, and its use in water pipes was reduced.

But at the same time, as Beth Gardiner recounts in her excellent book "Choked," the pressure was on to expand the use of lead. One idea was that since it's poisonous, you could use it as a chemical weapon to kill Germans. That didn't work out, so instead they put it in gasoline:

A Yale physiologist named Yandell Henderson had tested tetraethyl lead as a potential nerve agent during World War I, and when GM asked his thoughts on putting it into gasoline [in 1921], he replied with alarm. "Widespread lead poisoning was almost certain to result," he warned. Later he deemed it the "single greatest question in the field of public health that has ever faced the American public."

The science was clear: Lead is a powerful neurotoxin. The threat was vividly demonstrated at a New Jersey refinery whose tetraethyl lead operation was known as "the loony gas building" because of its workers' bizarre behavior -- stumbling, memory loss, explosions of rage. After an accident, dozens collapsed, suffering seizures and hallucinations; more than 30 were hospitalized and 5 died.

The Lead Industries Association was formed in 1928 to push back against state and local bans on lead pipes, advocate for leaded gasoline, and promote the use of lead paint. 

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