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Comment by deepGem | Hacker News Reader

Gosh this is not gonna go well with the public. I know several kids who just can't hold pee in the pool. They'll just let it out. Also its not like the toilets are right there. You often have to get out of the pool, walk like 100 yards or down a flight of stairs. It's a PITA. Even Michael Phelps once said in an interview that very rarely competitive swimmers get out of the pool to pee.

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I'm constantly shocked and disgusted that people actually pee in pools and that it's not some joke someone made up somewhere.

You could try to convince yourself of the therapeutic benefits of urine, might be better for your psyche in the long run.

Sort of like, spit in fast food builds antibodies.

Sometimes kids even poop in the pool. Happened at a pool we went to last week.

I would never swim in a pool like this. Every pool I've been to required toddlers to wear special swim diapers to prevent exactly this scenario.

There are some really nasty diseases that can spread through human waste, and I would not want to come in contact with them.

Parent of two kids that have used swim diapers. I would be very surprised if those diapers were even 10% effective. Out of the pool they're basically 0% effective.

And yes, I've read the instructions, and spoken to the folks who run the pool.

Mostly I think they're just there to keep the poop in long enough to get the kid out of the pool.

That is exactly what the swim diapers are for!

Are you suggesting that perhaps some people think it is all right to leave their kid in the pool with a swim diaper full of excrement?

Sure, but it's not always obvious when a kid wearing a swim diaper poops. And they don't always tell you. Especially if they know it means they have to get out of the pool to change the diaper.

Swim diapers basically keep the _turds_ stationary. Water will still chew away at it and disperse poop everywhere, so its basically run out of the water when an "accident" happens. Still better than solid poop floating around I guess, but also, potentially, really nasty.

Poop can still leak out of swim diapers. After going to swim lessons with my daughter and a dozen other 6-month-olds at the local YMCA, I understand why it is so heavily chlorinated.

I got a staff infection from the pool at our apartment when I was in middle school. Looking back, that apartment complex was a real dump.

Dark secret - swim diapers don't hold everything in.

And this is a dead giveaway you're not a parent, or have never dealt with swim diapers :)

Swim diapers are designed to simply make sure the poop and the kid are in the same general area and that it's easy to remove them from the water as a self contained unit. It will still absolutely contaminate the water in some way, there's no escaping it.

Or, rather, there is a lot escaping it. :)

I wish they would ban swim diapers altogether. You never know what's in there, there probably is something, if the parents see the necessity. Just ban child and parent for a month if they can't hold it and spoil the pool for everyone.

So how exactly do you propose telling a 1 or 2 year old not to poop in a pool?

Children who do not have proper bowel control yet are out of place in the public pool. Why should people have to put up with someone else's faeces? It's not hygienic.

I agree with you, but more importantly, I think I'm done with pools after reading the comments today.

You’ve been swimming in pools your entire life. Somehow you are still alive. Maybe it is way less of a deal than it actually seems.

When I grew up they always had a separate pool for babies.

potty training!

Sure, but the pool is supposed to be closed for a while for clean-up.

When the sign says "shower before entering the pool" they aren't just talking about sweat. They mean "clean your butthole, you are a filthy primate". If your butthole isn't clean before you enter the pool, you're pooping in the pool.

Urine and feces are completely different from a bacterial point of view, so this is a completely different level of contamination.

At a kiddie pool I visited sometimes, this happened and they drained the whole thing. Maybe there is a chlorine regime that can be applied when/if this happens to a larger pool.

This is likely not a widespread policy (or if it is, I doubt it's followed), but I'm pretty sure at a pool I worked at if there was feces they would evacuate the pool for 20m. 20m was chosen because that's how long the pump system would circulate all of the water 1x or 3x.

I mean, what about all the other body fluids/debris that are in pools? Saliva, sweat, earwax, belly button lint, bird shit, insects, band-aids, small animal carcasses that get trapped in the filters but are removed before the pool opens?

There's no avoiding other peoples/animals grossness, frankly whether your in a pool or just out and about.

Urine may be gross, but it's sterile, and at least for me, there are grosser things in pools.

Your comment appears to suggest you would find it not unpleasant to swim in a pool entirely filled with urine. Or do you acknowledge the fact that a lower concentration of bodily fluids in a swimming pool is more attractive as a swimmer?

I'm saying that singling out urine as the thing to be grossed out about in a pool, while understandable in a vacuum, is in reality one of the least problematic things in a pool, or in your daily environment in general.

So you shouldn't let the thought of potential urine in a pool stop you from enjoying pools, because if that's your threshold, you're going to have to drastically modify your daily habits to avoid things that are more dangerous/gross you encounter during every day tasks.

Everyone has their "this grosses me out" quirks. I just find it beneficial to do a reality check on them, to make sure that there's actually a reason to be grossed out by it, instead of letting an unfounded fear affect my decision making. And the reason I find this important is because I have plenty of those quirks myself.

>Your comment appears to suggest you would find it not unpleasant to swim in a pool entirely filled with urine.

I really hope someday I don't have to explicitly say things like "Just because I'm capable of swimming in a pool that might have some urine in it, doesn't mean I'm OK with swimming in a pool comprised solely of urine."

> I really hope someday I don't have to explicitly say things like "Just because I'm capable of swimming in a pool that might have some urine in it, doesn't mean I'm OK with swimming in a pool comprised solely of urine."

Just like I long for the day I don't have to explain to somebody that just because I know urine isn't dangerous to swim in doesn't mean I wouldn't prefer to swim in a pool with less urine. Yet here we are.

What was it W.C. Fields used to say about drinking water?

“It’s good for you”

-WCF

Fish chlorinate it?

"Gross" doesn't necessarily mean unhealthy.

I swim in the San Francisco Bay 3 times a week, 25 minutes at a time, no goggles, just a cap and a bathing suit. I've swum near gross things like dead seagulls & dead seals, and I'm sure a lot of gross stuff drains into the Bay, but as long as the sewage treatment plant doesn't overflow I'm not worried.

Agreed, that's kinda my point. The evolutionary theory behind why we have feelings of grossness is just that "this thing is potentially dangerous to me," so we developed this sense of "gross" so we'd avoid the potentially harmful thing (although a quick google search doesn't bring back the study i'm thinking of that demonstrated this). But obviously that reinforced/learned feeling might not always be accurate.

I get grossed out by plenty of things, so I have to consciously evaluate whether it's just gross, vs actually a problem. If it's just gross, I can consciously then decide to just get over it and have a nice swim (or whatever) regardless.

EDIT: Here's a couple links about what I'm trying to get at:

Study on disgust and the spread of disease: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...

Article on digust wrt the spread of disease: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/science/disgusts-evolutio...

I'm not sure about other cultures, but in Japan they're pretty explicit about washing before entering an onsen. They even discourage putting your towel in the water, wearing a bathing suit, or submerging your head (as well as going when you have open cuts or sores). But, they also prefer mineral water to chlorine and it's generally fed from a spring or the water is changed every day.

I'm not a fan of overly cleanliness, but not doing these things means you have to add more chlorine. In addition to the aesthetic unpleasantness of chlorine and other chemicals, it's harder on the pool equipment and like another commenter said, it should require better ventilation that most pools currently have.

This reminds me of being grossed out by particular foods. Nowadays I take the approach that if people have eaten it for a long time, it's probably worth at least a try.

Perhaps helped out because my #1 example is chicken. Who doesn't like chicken?... me, as a kid, because it was often prepared terribly.

That's why public pools really push showering /before/ you get into the pool.

This is why I don't swim in pools or natural bodies of water any more.

I never thought about it as a kid, but as an adult I'm much more conscious of all of this really disgusting stuff in there and it just really grosses me out.

Most of the things you listed you have no control over, but you can totally get out of the pool to pee. I see zero reason to pee in a public pool unless you are a toddler and have no control over it.

I read an article recently (can't find it) that the worst offenders are pro swimmers. They drink loads of water during their multi-hour workouts, and don't take breaks to go pee...

Urine is not sterile. Please stop spreading this myth. It's causing people do to nasty stuff like pee i sinks.

Just wait until you find out what's in the ocean.

I heard somewhere an interview with a water polo player who said he'd never known a player to get out of the pool to pee.

Umm... that's why you pee before you get in the pool. 100 yards isn't that much to ask to avoid swimming around in your own, and other's piss. Those kids will be swimming around for hours exerting way more energy than the walk to the bathroom. FFS. This is why I don't swim in pools.

Uh, I hate to break it to you, but unless you swim in a dead body of water, there are worse things than human urine and feces in the water...

Where I live, plenty more people are infected from bacteria in goose poop in lakes than from human waste in swimming pools.

That’s why it’s never such a good idea to swim in a lake.

At the very least, you shouldn’t stick your head in the water, and swimming in shallower areas exposes you more strongly to contaminants than in deep areas.

conversely, it seems like unless there are dead bodies in the water, human waste would be the worst likely contaminant. or am I missing something?

There's certainly the dead bodies/waste products of fish in natural water, and there's no chlorine to sterilize them.

Yeah, don't care. The mental image of 1000 kids peeing in the pool, and the same water being in it for months on end grosses me out to no end.

I also honestly can't imagine what is worse than human piss and shit. Maybe those leeches that swim up your dickhole? I don't think there are any of those around here. I'm genuinely curious what is worse...

> This is why I don't swim in pools.

Meaning you swim in lakes/rivers instead? I doubt animal waste and decay products are better. At least the pool has chlorine.

Wait until you find out you splash yourself with urine every time you use the toilet. Or that millions of bacteria are defecating on you as we speak. It's all in your head, these things are not harming you.

If said kids can't avoid peeing in the pool they shouldn't be in the pool or should be wearing diapers to avoid pissing all over fellow patrons.

The restrooms are rarely convenient in big box stores or the mall they are often a fair hike away but you don't see little Johnny hiking up his leg to pee on his fellow shoppers.

No diaper can hold pee in while in a pool. Pool diapers only hold poo, and even then only some of it.

> Pool diapers only hold poo, and even then only some of it.

Quite a lot, actually, but not all.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/15216564/

“Swim diapers of all three brands exhibited an approximately equal fine-solids retention capability of about 98 to 99 percent over 30 minutes of water immersion activity. Conventional disposable diapers invariably fell down or came apart during the experiments, resulting in very limited solids retention. This study indicates that commercially available swim diapers represent a vast improvement in reducing the potential for fecal material release in public pool facilities, but that some release will still generally occur with these products.”

I wonder how well they work in the real world? I had trouble finding a properly fitting swim diaper for my son. They seemed to require a fairly tight fit around the abdomen and legs (which vary greatly across children and as the grow). Because it's only a handful of times during the summer and most places only carried 1 or 2 styles, I can see the few people who got them might not have the right size or wear it properly.

If your kid for any reason including swim diapers sucking can't keep from shitting up the pool your kid just has to wait until this isn't true to swim doesn't seem like a hard choice.

Thanks for sharing your opinion, but I don't really see how that contributes to this conversation. This comments section has a whole lot of pretty hostile replies calling out parents. I don't really see how that addresses anything.

In my case, my child's doctor recommended taking him to a pool as therapy for his motor skills because of developmental problems. He was still over a year away from being potty trained. I researched and ordered 2 or 3 different swim diapers and tried to find the one that fit the best.

During this time I noticed that most brick-and-mortar stores only carry 1 or 2 kinds and I'm sure parents going to the pool on summer vacation won't have the patience I did. Which is why I was curious about this study. It reminded me that condom use is 98% effective, but under typical use is 88-90%. I can easily see the same thing happening with swim diaper effectiveness.

If you're actually concerned about public health and not just the ick factor, I would think young children would be completely banned in most pools or policies for dealing with feces would be more clear when it comes to licensing and regulation. This wasn't my experience working around pools years ago.

"In my case, my child's doctor recommended taking him to a pool as therapy for his motor skills because of developmental problems. He was still over a year away from being potty trained"

Seems like a special case that applies to 1 in 100,000. In most cases kids in diapers indeed ought to be restricted from public pools.

I'm not sure how common it is, but I've seen/heard of on multiple occasions a kid needing to pee in a department store and the parent saying something like "just go over there", with "over there" being somewhere on the floor where employees can't see.

Luckily this isn't a majorly normal thing, but it does happen from time to time.

Where in the world do you live?

If you've ever been to a resort with a wet bar, you might see people drinking for several hours without getting out of the pool. One can draw conclusions.

I was curious, so here's a source for the Michael Phelps tidbit:

https://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/08/06/breaking-news-fro...

Michael Phelps was fucking with whomever was interviewing him. I was a competitive swimmer and it's almost impossible to need to go pee while working out in a pool. Not only are you getting dehydrated by sweating profusely, you are getting dehydrated via osmosis.

I doubt Phelps was fucking with the interviewer. I was also a competitive swimmer and my experience matches what Phelps said.

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