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Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

It's striking how wealthy Romans had running water in their homes, 2000 years ago, when my parents in rural Belgium (!), some sixty years ago, had to make do with wells and rain water. Even today, millions (billions?) of people don't have access to clean drinking water, let alone running water. We've come so far, yet not.

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My guess is that rural Belgians had to make do with wells and rain water 2000 years ago as well.

The wealthy only.

Only the wealthy had clean water delivered to their homes, but public fountains were actually widespread, clean and free. This was in many ways better than the American/European average until pretty recently.

Today's EU/US poorest quartile people live better lives in absolute terms than European nobles mere 200 years ago.

As it was made out of lead, I'm not sure Roman plumbing would hold up to today's definition of "clean drinking water".

But yeah, todays access to clean drinking water is largely an economical issue, not so much a technical one.

A political issue, more like. A problem of nefficient distribution, not a lack of plenty.

Distribution is a vastly underestimated economic problem. Of course, politics can be a major factor too, but I wouldn't assume that politics is the problem just because there is plenty in one place and scarcity in another.

Depending on the contents of the water the lead is not as much as an issue as you'd expect. (See Flint, MI)

Archeological evidence suggests it was: https://www.pnas.org/content/111/18/6594

The average life expectancy was most likely less than it'd have taken to die from lead poisoning.

Kind of.... in antiquity (really anything more than 100-150 years ago), age of average mortality was dominated by deaths of the extremely young... but the reality is that people who did survive, often lived to their late 50s and early 60s.

Yep, if you survived childhood, you’d likely live long enough to see grandkids and ‘retire’ in Rome. In addition, a Roman army field medic/surgeon from the late republic/early empire onward was probably just as effective as any medic/doctor anywhere until the 19th century. Amputations, suturing lacerations, and so on didn’t really change at all until antiseptics and antibiotics.

It’s crazy to think how medicine didn’t really advance for ~2000 years, and then vaccinations, antiseptics, and anesthesia (and later antibiotics) came into use and medicine advanced rapidly. Oh, add in a dash of germ theory and the scientific method, and stir. The Romans were really quite amazing!

A) lead poisoning has horrible debilitating effects aside from death (death is not the important measure)

B) Excluding infant mortality, you were generally good to go to 55-60 in Rome, about where the US was in 1920's or 30's time frame.

C) that's plenty of time for acute or chronic lead poisoning to F anybody up.

Not really.

Highest mortality was among infants and young children. Once you reached age 20, odds were quite good of living to 60. Elders of 80+ years were common.

These are data from England and Wales, 1700 to present, but would all but certainly have been similar for ancient Rome:

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-b...

How much of it was lined with lead vs terra cotta. Most traversal was on aqueducts which I don’t think typically were lined with lead, but I’d love to be corrected on that.

Aqueducts are specific structures to span valleys when needed and certainly were not the primary structure to deliver water.

Aqueducts are the whole long structure bringing water to a settlement, including bridges, tunnels and channels along the ground.

Lead pipes are fine when the ph is the right level to create a barrier "passivization" layer within the pipe between the lead and the water. Rome's water's ph was naturally ok.

The issue with Flint was that they increased the acidity of the water by changing the water source, which removed that barrier.

Yes, acidity plays a role in it. No, Rome is not Flint, and --if you want to believe archeological evidence-- its water supply was NOT ok. https://www.pnas.org/content/111/18/6594

> Lead pollution of “tap water” in Roman times is clearly measurable, but unlikely to have been truly harmful.

You realize that heavy metal poisoning is cumulative right? There is no safe dosis.

I literally just quoted the conclusions paragraph of your article.

Sure there is. If the accumulated doses over time aren't unlikely to significantly harm someone before they die of something else, then it's safe.

The lead plumbing was a lot less damaging than the lead acetate used to sweeten wine.

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