I have been right all along. . . As part of my job, I do a lot of water testing in school buildings, →[More:]quite often at the behest of this or that teacher who feels that, somehow, the workplace is poisoning them (radon, mold, asbestos, lead paint, pcb's, etc etc etc).

The protocol is to do a "first draw" sampling, which means the first water out of the tap after standing overnight. There is always lead in the solder (even lead-free solder has it) and in the brass that most faucets contain some amount of lead in the alloy.

I usually get a small amount of lead, but rarely over 15 parts per billion, which is the "action level," at which we would be beholden to address it. After the water runs for a bit, the level goes down to undetectable (below 5ppb or so). There have been several occasions where I have had to have the plumbing changed out, because of too much old solder. So I always test on demand, due to the small chance of finding something.

But I have been telling people for years to run the water a bit before consuming any of it, and NEVER drink out of the hot water tap because hot water leaches a lot more metals out of the pipes, not to mention the gunk in most water heaters. If they do these two things, their lead intake from tap water will approach zero.

I even got in a bit of trouble once (at least had an admin type mad at me) for telling cooks, in a mass emailing, about this.