Calls for new hygiene standards for city swimming pools(2)

Blame the swimmers

Staff at the university swimming pool told the Global Times that swimmers and not the pool staff could be to blame. "We have one staff member in charge of the water quality. We do check our water and when we do that in the morning, before the pool is open to swimmers, everything is fine," he said.

The institute said that bacteria levels could be elevated if swimmers did not look after their personal hygiene and jumped into the water without taking a shower first or going through the disinfecting pools on the way to swimming. This could let their body fluids and waste contaminate the swimming pool.

Many swimmers are simply unaware that they have to shower before swimming. Yao Jia is a 25-year-old Shanghai woman who has been swimming at the Shanghai International Gymnastic Center for years, She said it never occurred to her since it was not listed as a rule and no one else seemed to bother.

"I do shower before we getting into the pool, but I thought this was just meant to get our bodies prepared for pool water. Other swimmers I have seen don't take this seriously either - some just take 10 seconds to shower. But when I think about it, since we have already changed into our swimming costumes when we have a shower there are parts of our bodies, that are not being cleaned or even rinsed properly," Yao said.

Staff at the university swimming pool said that they were now more strict and were checking to see patrons did shower before swimming as well as putting up signs warning people to do this. Staff said the pool's microflora levels have gone back to normal these days. And the institute agreed, confirming that tests on the university swimming pool and the other six pools where the levels were too high had been satisfactory recently.

It's apparently not just a lack of personal hygiene that can cause problems in swimming pools. Huffingtonpost.com has reported that sweat, cosmetics, perfume, hair products, bug sprays and other residue can mix with chlorine to create irritants (rather than the chlorine itself, according to popular belief) that can cause skin rashes and red eyes.

However, if someone is exposed to a pool of water with bacteria and other possible irritants, potential harm can be reduced by careful, thorough showering afterwards, advised Fudan's public health professor Song. "It helps swimmers get rid of the chlorine-related irritants on their skin and in their hair, as well as microflora on their skin that might lead to infections," Song said. He also advised swimmers to use eye drops afterwards.

Keeping numbers down

Wang Pin is the head of the institute's environment hygiene supervision department and he said another key to maintaining pool water quality was by limiting the number of swimmers at a venue. Though a local regulation issued in 2005 suggested that swimming pools should limit the number of swimmers and ensure each swimmer has an area of at least 2.5 square meters, this is not compulsory.

However many of the pools found to have breached the hygiene standards did keep the numbers of swimmers within set limits. While the Shanghai University's swimming pool theoretically could accommodate 500 swimmers at a time, at peak hours it has just between 300 and 400. Other swimming pools at gyms, including the Crowne Plaza Hotel, restrict the number of swimmers allowed.

Some in the business have suggested that to improve the quality of water in swimming pools, the standards have to be made more stringent. The clarity of swimming pool water is defined by nephelometric turbidity units (NTU) and while the current regulations set the levels for swimming pools at 5 NTU, even at a level of 2 NTU water can appear murky. At Dino Beach, a popular city fun park, visitors have long complained about the murky water on slides and in pools but institute inspectors who checked the water on July 31 found it measured 1.7 NTU.

The Shanghai Morning Post has reported that city authorities are currently drafting new regulations for public swimming pools and one likely recommendation will reduce the 5 NTU level to 0.5 NTU.