Second story, when I was a freshman in college I was auto placed to room with another girl in my dorm. About a month in she asks me if I was using the tap water to drink and brush my teeth. I was shocked that she asked me that and just responded with "of course". Apparently she had been using bottled water to brush her teeth for the first month. She was the bratty child of an obviously "well off" family and was totally spoiled, so apparently the college town of Urbana-Champaign was so backwoods that they might not have drinkable tap water.
There are actually parts of the USA where a significant number of houses and apartments still have lead solder, fixtures, and pipe. In New York City, for example, there were lead service lines being installed until 1961 and lead was allowed in soldering and fixtures (just not the pipe) until 1987. A lot of the houses and apartment buildings in that area, especially upstate, are more than 55 years old. They've often been very well maintained and have gone up in value since there's lots of demand for real estate in that part of the country. But it's not unusual for families who live in these older homes or apartments to have water coolers.
The municipal water supply is fine, and the main lines to public buildings were upgraded years ago, but the water in individual houses or apartments tends to have elevated levels of lead due to the lead in the pipes. A lot of those upstate places are also on wells and septic tanks as opposed to town or city water (it's astounding how few services are often available in such an "affluent" area, in a neighborhood with $2M and $3M homes you'd expect there to be sidewalks, trash collection, and water mains... but that's a separate rant). Anyway, if the student in question was from an affluent family that lived in one of those older homes, lead pipes may have been a fact of life for her.
Lead poisoning is a cumulative effect, although people tend to be more likely to get sick from lead paint than from lead in the water. So yeah, there's some lead hysteria.
It's probably a lot less expensive to use a Culligan type system than to build a new house or to pay for a plumbing upgrade in an existing older place if it happens to have lead pipes.