How much pee is in our swimming pools?
Posted: Thu Mar 02, 2017 3:04 am
Is this more information than you needed?
Olympic swimmers admit to it and it seems many of the rest us are peeing in the water too, with a new scientific test finding up to 75 litres of urine in public pools
It is an antisocial act that normally goes under the radar, but many swimmers have long suspected the truth: people are peeing in the pool.
Now scientists have been able to confirm the full extent of offending for the first time, after developing a test designed to estimate how much urine has been covertly added to a large volume of water. Regular swimmers with a keen sense of hygiene may wish to stop reading now.
The test works by measuring the concentration of an artificial sweetener, acesulfame potassium (ACE), that is commonly found in processed food and passes through the body unaltered.
After tracking the levels of the sweetener in two public pools in Canada over a three-week period they calculated that swimmers had released 75 litres of urine – enough to fill a medium-sized dustbin – into a large pool (about 830,000 litres, one-third the size of an Olympic pool) and 30 litres into a second pool, around half the size of the first.
Lindsay Blackstock, a graduate student at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, and lead author, said: “Our study provides additional evidence that people are indeed urinating in public pools and hot tubs.”
Although the researchers were unable to confirm exactly what fraction of visitors were choosing to quietly relieve themselves in the water rather than making the shivery trip to the changing rooms, the results suggest that the urine content was being topped up several times each day.
“We did not monitor the number of pool users over the three week time period ... so there is no way we could estimate the number of individual urination events per day,” said Blackstock. Read More:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... -the-truth
Olympic swimmers admit to it and it seems many of the rest us are peeing in the water too, with a new scientific test finding up to 75 litres of urine in public pools
It is an antisocial act that normally goes under the radar, but many swimmers have long suspected the truth: people are peeing in the pool.
Now scientists have been able to confirm the full extent of offending for the first time, after developing a test designed to estimate how much urine has been covertly added to a large volume of water. Regular swimmers with a keen sense of hygiene may wish to stop reading now.
The test works by measuring the concentration of an artificial sweetener, acesulfame potassium (ACE), that is commonly found in processed food and passes through the body unaltered.
After tracking the levels of the sweetener in two public pools in Canada over a three-week period they calculated that swimmers had released 75 litres of urine – enough to fill a medium-sized dustbin – into a large pool (about 830,000 litres, one-third the size of an Olympic pool) and 30 litres into a second pool, around half the size of the first.
Lindsay Blackstock, a graduate student at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, and lead author, said: “Our study provides additional evidence that people are indeed urinating in public pools and hot tubs.”
Although the researchers were unable to confirm exactly what fraction of visitors were choosing to quietly relieve themselves in the water rather than making the shivery trip to the changing rooms, the results suggest that the urine content was being topped up several times each day.
“We did not monitor the number of pool users over the three week time period ... so there is no way we could estimate the number of individual urination events per day,” said Blackstock. Read More:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... -the-truth