Health Wanted: Pools

The topic: Swimming is an important skill to decrease your risk of drowning, but not everyone has the opportunity to learn how to do it. This week on Health Wanted, host Laurel Bristow and guest Megan Benvenuto dive into the health concerns and benefits of pools and how important they are for people to learn to swim. 

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The takeaway: Pools provide a great way to stay active and cool during the summer, without much risk of spreading germs or illness. They also offer a safe environment for people to learn how to swim. However, not everyone has access to pools or swimming lessons, which increases their risk of drowning and threatens public health.

• Chlorine is an important chemical disinfectant added to pools to protect swimmers from contaminants like urine or sweat. It can even kill harmful pathogens like E. coli and hepatitis A. But chlorine’s disinfectant capabilities are limited. It cannot eliminate certain pathogens like Cryptosporidium, a parasite that causes diarrhea and spreads easily in water. That is why people who have had recent gastrointestinal issues should avoid swimming in public pools.
• In the late 19th and 20th centuries, public pools in the U.S. served as communal baths for people without indoor plumbing. As indoor plumbing became more affordable, swimming in pools became more of a recreational activity. In the 1940s and 1950s, polio cases surged in the U.S., especially in the summer when swimming was most popular. People did not yet understand how polio spread, but they thought pools might play a role, so cities shut them down out of fear.
• Most public pools were racially segregated until the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964. In response, many white residents lashed out at Black pool-goers, and some communities drained the pools entirely to avoid integration. As a result, more people began building private pools or joining private swim clubs. This shift reduced access to pools for families who could not afford private options and limited their opportunities to learn how to swim.
• Today, drowning is the greatest risk associated with swimming and pools. Children from low-income families face a higher risk, which ties back to the segregation and limited access to pools from the 1900s. If parents never learned to swim, their children are much less likely to learn. Twenty-six percent of Black parents and 34% of Latino parents report never learning to swim, compared to just 4% of white parents.
   

The Interview

The guest: Megan Benvenuto

The key takeaways:

• Community pools are great places for people to socialize, exercise, and enjoy time with family and friends, but it is important to do so safely. A responsible adult should always be actively watching when children are in or around water—this means no cell phones or distractions. Drowning can happen quickly and silently, even in shallow water, so alert supervision is critical for avoiding emergencies.
• Swimming and water safety lessons can start as early as six months old. Even before children are ready to swim, it is important to establish safe habits around water and talk to them about water safety. Starting this education early helps reinforce pool rules and safe behavior around water from the beginning.
• It’s never too late to learn how to swim. People of all ages can benefit from swimming lessons. However, if you don’t know how to swim or are not a confident swimmer, you should always wear a life jacket when spending time in the water. This is especially important when swimming outdoors, like in rivers and oceans. Unlike pools, natural bodies of water can be unpredictable. Even strong swimmers may have difficulty in rough water.
• Every community pool should have a trained staff member who is certified to check and add chemicals into the pool. Pool water should be tested at least twice a day to make sure it meets safety standards for disinfection. Community pools are licensed through local county health departments, and their inspection histories are often available online if you want to check the status of your local pool.

The Listener Questions 

What is aerosol transmission, and how is it different from droplets?

Diseases like COVID-19 spread through aerosols, which are very tiny particles that are expelled through coughing, sneezing, and breathing. They can be suspended in air and travel over longer distances than a bigger droplet would.

Droplets get expelled from the mouth or nose and are heavier, so they cannot travel as far as aerosols can.

Measles and tuberculosis also spread through the air, but they last longer in the environment than COVID-19 does. COVID-19 has a layer around it that dries out quickly in the air and leaves the virus deactivated. Measles aerosols can hang out in the air for up to two hours after an infected person has left the room.

To best protect against aerosolized bacteria and viruses, ventilation is important.  Even in labs in low-resource settings that work up close with tuberculosis samples, they often have a protocol of keeping windows open.

In higher-resource settings, HVAC systems with MERV13 filters do a good job of particle filtration. In the case of wildfire air pollution, people should make sure the vents on the HVAC systems or bathroom exhausts are closed to stop the ash from getting in the house, but if your goal is filtration for disease, then make sure those vents are open to get clean outdoor air in.

Respirator masks are also good for protecting yourself. Many masks with filters protect against even smaller particles than aerosols, like vapors and gases, but you have to take into consideration that masks and ventilators with exhale valves are less effective at protecting those around you if you happen to be infected and contagious.

UV disinfectors are also a good option. We’ve had a technology for germicidal ultraviolet energy for a while that’s proven to be quite good at killing germs, particularly tuberculosis, but it’s expensive, and it has to be installed on the upper part of a room with proper circulation so that the air passes through it.

Far-UV is the same concept but a different wavelength, so it’s much easier to install and use because there isn’t the same risk of cell damage to people as from UV rays.

Are there long-term effects of bird flu infection?

It is possible, but unclear if there’s a risk of “long bird flu” the way there is with long COVID-19. There have not been enough bird flu cases or follow-ups to know that answer.

Historically, the majority of bird flu cases have been very severe, and with severe illness comes a hard recovery.

The majority of the recent bird flu cases in humans in the U.S. have been mild, but it’s unclear if that is a factor of the variant of bird flu or the type of people who are getting infected (e.g., younger people or physically active farm workers).

It’s also possible that a portion of the people infected experience lingering symptoms. We now know that the flu can cause long-term symptoms in a portion of people who get sick.

Long COVID has gotten a lot of attention because so many people got sick at the same time when the pandemic was beginning, so it was much more noticeable when so many people continued to experience lingering symptoms that could be debilitating.
 

Catch all the listener questions and Laurel’s answers on the full episode of Health Wanted by:

• Streaming at wabe.org or the WABE app
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