Don’t Swim In Public Pools! They’re Full Of Poop & Urine.

But do you really know what you’re getting when you dive into a pool such as this?
Let’s try pee and poop for starters. And if you think chlorine totally protects you from that and other yucky stuff, think again.

“People believe that the water is sterile because it’s a pool with chlorine in it, but the reality is as soon as you stick a human body in water, it’s no longer sterile. There are bacteria and germs that can get in the water,” says Thomas Lachocki, PhD, CEO of the National Swimming Pool Foundation , USA.  Read more after cut...

Those bacteria and germs which come from you and your fellow swimmers, can make it harder for chlorine to do its job.

One major culprit: urine. The true reason swimmers get red, irritated eyes is not the chlorine itself, but from a reaction caused when pee mixes with chlorine, Lachocki says.

When chlorine is battling urine and other wastes, it loses the ability to fully protect us from other lingering pool germs, says Michele Hlavsa, RN, MPH, chief of the CDC’s Healthy Swimming Program.

The chlorine is busy mixing with what we bring into the water, and there is less chlorine to kill the germs. We are kind of using up the chlorine with what’s washing off of our bodies,” Hlavsa says.
Studies show the average person brings into the pool:

0.14 grams of poop
One or two coke cans’ worth of sweat
One cup of pee
And billions of skin microbes
Pool water can also carry diseases such as norovirus, E. coli, and legionella. Chlorine kills those, but in the small window of time before the germs die, swallowing even a small amount of water can make you sick.

But cryptosporidium, a type of parasite found in diarrhea, can survive in chlorinated water for up to 10 days and make you sick for weeks.

So there you have it, anytime you think of going swimming, think twice.
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