| Sanitation: If your neighbour has unmanaged sewage, it is certainly not a problem that is limited to them. Health: If your neighbour has a contagious disease, that is going to be an issue for society as well. Are we going to pretend that COVID as a problem doesn't fit your chosen definition perfectly: "two people to have it, and that they must have it in relation to each other, which is to say, some sort of social interaction or communication must be involved as well." Sanitation and health are social problems because if they are not handled they have an extreme effect on society in general. Hell, for plumbing we ONLY care about it as a social problem. If you go live somewhere far enough away from people, we don't care if you shit in a bucket. If you live in a city, we absolutely care about the social effects of not having sufficient plumbing. If my neighbour has a broken TV, that's a problem that will never affect society. If my neighbour has a contagious disease, or even a non-contagious condition, there are a LOT of ways that affects society. Same with a neighbour with plumbing that isn't up to code. There's a reason we send government agents in to verify plumbing installations, but we don't give two shits about your TV setup. I suspect that anyone that says that plumbing or health is not a social problem is living in a place where those things are handled well enough as a social problem that you have never seen what happens when they aren't handled. |