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Hard-to-kill poop parasites that lurk in swimming pools on the rise, CDC warns
Outbreaks of the gastrointestinal parasite cryptosporidium have been spurting upward since 2009, with the number of outbreaks gushing up an average of 13% each year, according to researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The germ spreads via the fecal-oral route and causes explosive, watery diarrhea that can last for up to three weeks. Most victims pick up the infection from recreational waters, such as swimming pools and water parks.
The main trouble is that crypto is extremely tolerant of chlorine and can happily stay afloat in well-treated pools for more than seven days. Thus, sick swimmers are the main source of infection—often young children who have yet to master toilet skills and also have more of a tendency to gulp pool water. An infected person can shed 100 million parasite eggs in one bout of diarrhea. Knocking back just 10 or fewer eggs in contaminated pool water can lead to an infection.
A 2013 study released by the CDC found that 58% of tested pools were positive for bacteria typically present in fecal matter.
[...] In all, the CDC recorded 444 outbreaks, involving 7,465 cases, 287 hospitalizations, and one death from the parasite. The number of cases per outbreak ranged from two to 638. However, the CDC notes that the figures likely underestimate the number of outbreaks and cases given that not every state reliably reports outbreaks and many people don't report their illnesses.
(Score: 5, Informative) by edIII on Wednesday July 03 2019, @08:10PM (3 children)
You're funny, but the scary part is that nobody is really shitting in the pool.
I was reading another article about this:
So basically, unless everyone is literally washing their assholes clean with bidets/washcloths, everyone's asses have a little poop on them. This gets mixed together into one large bowl of poop flavored soup, that we pay money to swim in (and swallow a little of).
This is why I haven't been swimming in recreational pools my entire adult life. I already knew that through a simple process of deduction. If the average person seems to have problems with skidmarks, then the average person doesn't have a really clean butt. That's not including children too. A toddler in a water park is basically a poop bomb waiting to go off while you pass it around in the water.
What I didn't know was how ineffective the mitigation efforts were against specific organisms like cryptosporidium. Family thought I was just being too squeamish, but science to the rescue :)
Recreational pools are beyond disgusting. I appreciate the Japanese custom of washing yourself thoroughly before getting into the public baths. That's about the only public bath I would ever get in.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Thursday July 04 2019, @12:42AM
Interesting... so we need a butt wash station, like a car wash station, for every public pool and have it as a mandatory gate into the pool. Sounds like a viable business model there buddy!
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday July 04 2019, @03:17AM
I mostly agree with you, but let me point out that shit is everywhere. There's shit on your hands right now. It might be a statistically insignificant amount of shit, but if you used state of the art instruments to measure it, it would show up. Hell, we grow our food in shit (generally not human shit though). There's no such thing as pure cleanliness; you have to draw the line somewhere at the amount of shit you want to tolerate, and drawing that line too low is a mental disorder (mysophobia).
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Friday July 05 2019, @04:40PM
I think that SN may be the only forum I’ve ever seen in which the word “skidmark” was used in a discussion of public health policy. Kudos all around!