Pool chemicals are responsible for the increasing number of preventable emergency room visits among children, according to a CDC report.
As fun as swimming pools may be, they can also be very dangerous for children. According to a new CDC report, 5,000 emergency room visits were reportedly due to injuries from pool chemicals in 2012. Most of the patients were children and teens.
The report also notes that most of the injuries took place in home swimming pools. Additional, most pool chemical injuries took place during the summer and more than half of them occurred in the weekends. "Chemicals are added to the water in pools to stop germs from spreading. But, they need to be handled and stored safely to avoid serious injuries," said Michele Hlavsa, chief of CDC's Healthy Swimming Program, in a press statement. Researchers used data from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) for the study. The CDC also released a set of guidelines for home owners to follow with regard to maintaining their pools: - Properly read instructions on product labels before using them - Wear appropriate safety equipment, such as goggles and masks, as directed, when handling pool chemicals. - Ensure no children or animals have access to the pool when chemicals are being used. - Avoid mixing two chemicals, especially chlorine and acid. - Add pool chemicals to water, not the other way round Of late, dangerous health hazards of swimming pools have been brought to the fore. A study conducted earlier this year found that "peeing" in the pool can have dire health consequences. Urine mixes with chlorine in swimming pool water to create two chemical by-products that can cause potential health problems. Urine in pools is not the only problem. A May 2013 CDC report revealed that feces (human poop) are frequently introduced into pool water by swimmers. 58 percent of the tested feces samples contained Escherichia coli, a bacterium that lives in the digestive tract of humans and other warm-blooded animals.
