Drink the Water

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ORGANISING A policy document on 'Women and the SOA'; first passed in May 1981 and amended since, commits the SO groups:

*to operate positive discrimination, *to affiliate to Women's Fightback, to help sell the WF paper, and to seek joint work with WE, *to organise regular baby-sitting rotas to enable comrades who have babies or young children to look after to attend meetings, *to organise educationals on women's liberation; and to organise educationals on general socialist theory run by women SO supporters for women SO supporters.

The priorities document stressed the importance of putting this into practice. A few weeks ago the Science column reported on the hazards of lead in petrol. Recent information from Italy and the USA suggested that at least a third of lead in the blood comes from lead additives to netrol. which leaves the N FUNAN, „vuYY question of where the other two-thirds comes from?

One source is lead from Nen anamen ia lood fram water pipes. In soft water areas, which include the whole of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, the West Country, the North-West and parts of the North-East of England. (and cities which get their water from these areas) the slightly acidic water dissolves lead from pipes.

Aithnuch loan na longer used for water pipes, sufficient of the old pipes remain to make drinking water an important source of lead pollution. According to a report a few weeks ago in the Western Mail, of Cardiff, the entire water supply of Wales would fail to meet proposed BEC standards limiting the lead content of domestic water supplies. No doubt other soft water areas have the same problem.

Now, scientists working at the Water Research Centre have reported that even new houses, with copper piping, can have dangerously high lead levels in their drinking water. Joints in the copper pipes are usually made using lead solder.

Although the amount of lead in contact with the water is tiny compared with lead pipes, the fact that the two metals are in contact with a weakly acidic water results in a primitive electrolytic battery being formed. The nett result is that despite the small amount of lead in contact with the water, it dissolves much more readily than the lead in an ordinary lead pipe.

Dose In an attempt to replicale une nato the randitinne under which lead solder is used in domestic water pipes, the Water Research Council scientists produced lead levels of up to 6,000 micrograms per litre, 120 times the limit recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO). And in samples taken from an ordinary house, levels of four times the safe dose were found.

Devon County Council have banned the use of lead solder in drinking water supplies after finding levels five times the WHO limit in a school in Bideford and seven times the limit in a block of flats for the elderly and disabled in Brixham.

Despite the growing evidence that even small doses of lead affect intellectual ability, and the implication of lead in still births and congenital malformations, the Department of the Environment, for whom the research was carried out, have sat on the report for a year.

They do not plan to implement its recommendations for a ban on lead solders, and their replacement with tin/silver solders and compression fittings, yet 70,000 houses are built annually in soft water areas. The great bulk of them have lead soldered. copper pipes.

Class Fighter - paper of the National Left Wing Youth Movement of the LPYS. 107 plus postage from BM Bor 5277, London WCIN 3X.Y.

1#95272003*7573

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