You Should Never Pee in the Pool
I remember the first time I ever (intentionally) peed in the pool. I was 9 years old and my swim team was having a treading water contest. In the middle of the contest I told my coach I had to go. She told me that I should go, just not get out of the pool, and that the chlorine would take care of it. So I went. I won the contest, and it was the beginning of an era.
I say this without shame because competitive swimmers (and babies) everywhere do this all the time, especially even Michael Phelps. As reassured as TMZ is by his apparent conviction that there is nothing wrong with it, I’m fairly certain the extent of the science behind that position is “because chlorine.” But hey, he still gets paid a million dollars to eat a sandwich on TV and I just invented a new logical fallacy: the argument from Michael Phelps.
According to chemical engineer of Purdue University Ernest Blatchley, “There’s this perception that peeing in the pool is okay because there’s chlorine, and that is just not true.” The uric acid in urine (the whole reason it is called urine in the first place) and sweat reacts with chlorine in the pool, creating different compounds, most concerning being cyanogen chloride (CNCl) and trichloramine (NCl3). There are a few studies like this that link these compounds to respiratory ailments, though more research on this topic is still needed. Blatchley has found these compounds in every pool he has sampled over the last ten years. According to that article, samples taken before and after a swim meet drove the levels of these compounds up by a factor of four, well above EPA safety levels. Blatchley and his colleagues recently published a study in Environmental Science & Technology attributing 93% of the uric acid causing these compounds to the presence of urine in swimming pools.
I will never pee in a pool again, or I guess on anyone for that matter. (For the record, I’ve never [intentionally] peed on anyone, this article just required a lot of pee research) I’d also like to note that it is still ok to pee in the ocean.
Yea, that total crap, so some reading on the pee thing here (Ars Technica): http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/03/ask-ars-how-much-pee-in-a-pool-would-kill-you/
I was glad to see this article and I hope everyone heeds your warning. As a former chemistry teacher, I also hope you can correct the chemical formulas. Only the first letter of an element symbol should be capitalized, so chlorine is Cl, not CL (which looks like carbon and some mystery element L).
Really? damn, I must admit I did more than once in my life, Also peed in lakes, you know, your in the middle of a lake and you have to go, you go! But I always did that, not because of chlorine, but because I thought that urine is sterile! Damn, Wrong again! wow, time to unlearn what we have learned.
Urine. IS (usually) sterile.. this article is talking about it reacting with other compounds in the pool.
Well Inside the article, there’s link to another article, and it seems that urine is not totally sterile after all, even if you are healthy!
Actually, in the lake is totally fine. No chlorine to react with, and it’s already being urinated in by all the wildlife around it.
I thought you couldn’t pee in the ocean because little creatures will follow the warm stream right back into you? Please correct me if I’m wrong. 🙂
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candiru
That’s the little bugger right there.
@Serge, Thank for the other article, always good to have more info. yeah concentration are very in the end.
So if it’s the chlorine that’s the problem due to reaction with urine, and not the urine itself, what about a pool that uses salinization instead of chlorine? Seems like that would be ok to urinate in, right?
Not sure this is the case for all salt pools, but when I looked into converting to salinisation (to replace a simple slow dissolving chlorine tablet method) I had to have an electrolysis device in the pool shed to “crack” the salt to create free chlorine.
Saline pools use an electrolysis cell to produce chlorine from salt. It is still a chlorinated pool.
From ArsTechnica’s analysis… “In the end, we need a pool that is two parts water to one part chlorine and would probably burn the eyeballs out of your sockets and make your skin peel away from your bones (this calls for a pool boy who can only be criminally sadistic). If you and three million other people could get at this pool and unload your pee into it before your bodies melted, before the crowd crushed you to death, and before you drowned from the massive tidal wave of pee… yes, you could feasibly die of cyanogen chloride poisoning originating from chlorinated water and pee”
So go ahead and pee. But maybe just enough to keep your bladder from exploding.
Ok, so if I’m reading this right, this is an issue that could just as easily be countered with better ventilation and would be irrelevant to the people in the picture considering its an outdoor pool.
I peed in the Hotel pool just last week, more people do it than you think?
A few weeks ago a young man peed into a 30,000 gallon reservoiir. The city pumped the reservoir dry and refilled it because of the “contamination”
I have heard public pools now have a chemical in the water which creates a brightly colored plume around the pee-er (the guilty one). Lifeguards can now yell at, and embarrass, those who pee in pools.
Never found that chemical in all the pol shops I’ve been to …
Whatever science says, it is still disgusting lol. I try not to do it.
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Farstechnica.com%2Fscience%2F2014%2F03%2Fask-ars-how-much-pee-in-a-pool-would-kill-you%2F&h=nAQFTVGi2 ???
Pools are somewhat disgusting. You have to shock them after heavy use to get rid of the stuff that comes off swimming (probably don’t have to go into details …, or the additional possibilities if animals get in the water) and keep an algicide to stop them going green. The Chlorine stops bacteria growth, but don’t run out of it. If the water looks cloudy, I would suggest not swimming. And all the larger results of the above get trapped in the filter, and the rest is gradually diluted as water is used to wash out the filter (for the larger particles) and is replaced with fresh water.
… But I wouldn’t give our pool up!
As a chemist, 1st off, it’s primarily urea, not uric acid in the urine. Get too much uric acid in your urine and they can form kidney stones. 2nd off, a long-standing mantra of toxicologists everywhere is “The dose makes the poison”. While tobacco is not good for you, you don’t see warnings saying you are going to drop dead the first minute you take a puff – though reading about the dangers of nicotine would lead you to believe so (LD50 of 50 milligrams, and can kill in around two minutes). The dose in a cigarette or cigar is just too low. Water kills around 3 people yearly in the US because of overdose (they drink to much of it in a short period of time). Should it have warnings?
Now unless someone shows me, quantitatively, that the chloramine and cyanogen Cl levels are even remotely dangerous with the upper level rates of people peeing in a pool – I call BS.
I don’t swim in your toilet, don’t pee in my pool.
I’ve pooed in a lake, is that okay? Felt good, there was no where else to go!
So we have s salt water pool, any research done on that???
Been drinking my pee for as long as i remember, and my experience says this research is more whack than drinking my own pee.
Another famous play toy of the present world are dolls.
Avoid spending a lot of money on toys that a child will
quickly outgrow. Check twice that the toys you are buying are made
up of non-toxic materials and thus are not a health hazard for your dog.
So, in this case children will start to think as well as use
their mind to do something new.
So is it still ok to take a crap ?