BTW polyvinyl-chloride is a rather nasty plastic and if you're on city water the water in your kitchen sink has probably been running thru miles of it.
Besides PVC, there's a good possibility that it ran through AC (asbestos-concrete) pipe as well. I personally installed AC pipe on projects past the mid 80's. It was banned in the mid 80's but there are miles of it still in the ground in most cities.
Some estimates place the total at 400,000 mile of asbestos/concrete water lines in the USA.
There is considerable debate on the lethality. Lethality is caused by the fibrous forms of asbestos. The particulate or lumpy forms do not cause lung damage, according to current accepted practice.
The lethality of fibrous asbestos is the sharpness of the fiber and the ability of the fiber to act as a microscopic spear puncturing lung cells, replacing healthy structures with scar tissue and degrading the ability of the remaining lung cells to function normally.
There seems to be a lack of firm understanding of what ingestion of the fibrous material does to the body. Eventually, they might figure it out.
If anybody wants to volunteer for the experiments........
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