A Belgian study has found that children who swim in indoor swimming pools have a raised risk of wheezing and asthma. The researchers found that for each extra swimming pool per 100,000 people, asthma rates in an area go up by two to three percent. The study was carried out by scientists at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium.
It is thought that this could be due to chlorine build-up in indoor pools, which don’t have the ventilation of outdoor pools.
You can read about this study in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
The scientists advise indoor swimming pool staff to carefully check chlorine levels and make sure ventilation systems are the best they can find.
The team looked at rates for asthma, hay fever, allergic rhinitis, atopic eczema in a study of 180,000 children, aged 13-14 from various European countries. They also checked how many indoor pools there were per 100,000 people in the areas. The density of swimming pools varied greatly, in Eastern Europe many areas had just one indoor pool for every 300,000 people while in Western Europe the average was about one for every 50,000 people.
The researchers found that the prevalence of childhood asthma was closely linked to the number of indoor pools for every 100,000 people. Even after factoring out differences in wealth, climate and altitude, the link was still there. For every extra pool for each 100,000 people, childhood wheezing rates in that area rose by 3.38%, while childhood asthma rates rose by 2.73%.
Ecological association between childhood asthma and availability of indoor chlorinated swimming pools in Europe
Nickmilder Marc 1 and Alfred M Bernard 1*
1 Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium
Occup Environ Med. Published Online First: 17 July 2006.
doi:10.1136/oem.2005.025452
See Abstract Online
Written by: Christian Nordqvist
Editor: Medical News Today