I Hope They’ve Been Chlorinating

It’s Memorial Day weekend! That means Americans are heading en masse to the pool. Hopefully, many of that masse will take this article from cnn.com to heart, and resist the temptation to keep the party rolling non-stop by peeing in the pool.

Although urine in the water probably will not cause swimmers to go to the emergency room, it causes “more of a respiratory, ocular irritation: the red puffy eyes or a cough, an itchy throat,” said Michele Hlavsa, an epidemiologist in the division of parasitic diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” A big health message is not to urinate or pee in the water.”

And it happens far more frequently than water-lovers would like to think. In a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults conducted in April and May, 17 percent admitted relieving themselves in a swimming pool. Even the Olympics’ most decorated swimmer, Michael Phelps, confessed to urinating in the water to TV host Jimmy Kimmel in a 2008 interview.

And if that’s not enough to put a damper on this weekend’s pool party fun, the survey

found that 11 percent of the surveyed adults said they have swum with a runny nose, 7 percent with an exposed rash or cut and 1 percent when ill with diarrhea. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

Suddenly, a 3.1% margin of error seems HUGE! But never mind, I’m being a party pooper, aren’t I? (pun score!) Dive in anyway, and here’s a soundtrack for some summer fun: “I Peed in the Pool,” a bad-taste parody of Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl.” (You can buy the mp3 here if you’re so inspired!)

Lyrics include: I peed in the pool and I liked it, It saved me a trip to the toilet
I peed in the pool ‘stead of waiting, I hope they’ve been chlorinating