"Doody!"

Reminiscent of probably the most famous scene from Caddyshack, the NYT explains, at length, why swimming in a pool in which someone has defecated is hazardous to your health:

As Dr. Michael Beach (his real name), an epidemiologist in the parasitic disease section of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said, "A lot of these bugs just live in the wild and we get in their way."

Dr. Beach is involved in the healthy swimming campaign for the agency. The seashore and rivers, ponds and lakes are part of its concern, because they can certainly contain health hazards, even if they are not polluted. But the current focus is on pools and a parasite called cryptosporidium.

Discussing the way it is spread is a really unpleasant job. But, the agency has decided, somebody has to do it. Here is something from one of their warning brochures. "Think about it!" the big type blurts. "You share the water with everyone in the pool. If someone with diarrhea contaminates the water, swallowing the water can make you sick."

* * * *
And then there are pools. They have chlorine, which kills almost everything, but not immediately. It takes the chlorine in a pool six or seven days to kill cryptosporidium.

What the Centers for Disease Control suggests to combat the parasite is increased vigilance by pool staffs and swimmers. Thus the agency's brochure "Fecal Accident Response Recommendations for Pool Staff: What Do You Do When You Find Poop in the Pool?" and its poster that looks like an eye chart. It poses the question, "Can you read this?" The letters of the chart say: "Have diarrhea? Don't swim."

The reason for the campaign, Dr. Beach said, is that diarrhea outbreaks caused by cryptosporidium - though still rare, considering the hundreds of millions of visits to pools each summer - are 10 times as common as they were 15 years ago.

I always joked that a trip to the community pool (or, for that matter, to Wal-Mart) is a guaranteed case of pink-eye. Comparatively speaking, pink-eye would be a delight.

Comments

[Bud Norton]

I read that article but drawing the always-topical "Caddyshack" reference escaped me. Bravo, Vincent.