van Poppel F, van der Heijden C
Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI), The Hague, Netherlands.
Health Transit Rev. 1997 Oct;7(2):113-48.
The provision of clean water is mentioned as an important factor in many studies dealing with the decline of mortality in Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In developing countries too, improved water supply is assumed to have a strong impact on mortality. When studying the effect of water supply on public health, researchers are confronted with many methodological problems. Most of these also apply to historical studies of the subject. We review the evidence from this historical research, taking into account the methodological problems observed in contemporary impact evaluation studies, and we use more refined data from the Dutch city of Tilburg, enabling us to overcome many of these shortcomings. Finally, we discuss some factors which may explain why we failed to discover an effect of the availability of piped water on the level of childhood mortality.
在许多关于19世纪末和20世纪初欧洲死亡率下降的研究中，清洁水的供应被视为一个重要因素。在发展中国家，改善供水也被认为对死亡率有很大影响。在研究供水对公共卫生的影响时，研究人员面临许多方法学问题。其中大多数问题也适用于该主题的历史研究。我们回顾了这项历史研究的证据，考虑到当代影响评估研究中观察到的方法学问题，并使用了来自荷兰蒂尔堡市更精确的数据，这使我们能够克服其中许多缺点。最后，我们讨论了一些因素，这些因素可能解释了为什么我们未能发现自来水供应对儿童死亡率水平有影响。
