Urine, sweat, and lotions all react with treated pool water to form chemical by-products, but the jury’s still out on whether those by-products are harmful to you health.
By Celia Henry Arnaud
Audrey Eldridge brings an inhaler with her whenever she gets in the pool. An elite Masters swimmer from Colorado Springs, she swims between 3,000 and 4,000 meters per day. She notices respiratory effects that can strike depending on the conditions where she’s swimming.
Eldridge hasn’t been diagnosed with asthma, but many elite swimmers have been. In fact, studies have shown a statistically significant link between professional swimming and the respiratory ailment. Professional swimmers like the ones who will dive into the pool at the Summer Olympics this week in Rio de Janeiro can log upward of 10,000 meters per day during training. That’s a lot of time spent exposed to the chemicals in and around swimming pools.
It takes a lot of chemicals to make pool water safe for swimming. Untreated water can accumulate harmful Escherichia coli and Salmonella bacteria and protozoans such a Cryptosporidium Parvum and Gardia Lamblia. So the disinfection chemicals are necessary for killing pathogens, but at the same time, they don’t just float around inertly in the water. Many of them react with organic material in the water — dirt, sweat, urine, and even skin moisturizers — to form disinfection by-products (DBPs).