Keep sewage away from drinking water.
It doesn’t seem like an amazing idea, does it? I expect that you could get agreement on this point from all Canadians. It’s just something we know, you know? Hasn’t it always been this way?
No. It first started being a significant problem about 10,000 years ago when we stopped being primarily hunters/gatherers and began being farmers and dwellers in one fixed spot. Still, it was a long slog until someone had a better idea than getting excreta out of your dwelling by throwing it into the street – or, maybe, until they had the technology to implement that idea. It was 3000 B.C. before latrines were first linked to a city’s sewage system in what is now Pakistan, and it wasn’t until 100 B.C. that a Roman decree *required* city residents to use latrines connected to the sewage system that ran under the streets. Of course, in those pre-modern-medicine days, the incentive to use plumbing wasn’t better health: It was less smell.
However, progress is worse than slow: it’s fickle. After the fall of the Roman Empire, things went backward for quite a while. In mid-18th-century England, all the Brontë sisters died young from, at least in part, lifelong consumption of water contaminated by sewage. Oh, and by a local graveyard. Oh, yuck.
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