Dr. Ernest Blatchley

Thank you for the invitation.

It's really a reactor.

People jump in the pool and they leave various things behind that might have been on their skin, including sweat, deodorants, things that they apply to their skin like makeup or sunscreen.

There's also chlorine in the pool and people urinate or pee in the pool more often than you would think.

I have not personally, but I think if you were to do a survey, I have done this sort of informally.

If you were to do a survey of people who swim in a pool, first of all, ask them to close their eyes so that they can't see the responses of other people in the room.

But ask them how many people pee in the pool.

You'd see, I don't know, three quarters of the people in the room are going to raise their hand.

Yes.

Well, if you were to talk to competitive swimmers, for example, they commonly will not get out of the pool.

And yet all of them, or virtually all of them, have one or two water bottles waiting for them at the end of the lane when they're resting between sets.

Do the math.

So it's just the way it goes.

Well, so we use chlorine in pools to

inactivate microbial pathogens that could cause other problems.

And chlorine is pretty good at that.

But chlorine also reacts broadly.

It's a very reactive chemical, and it's going to react with many things that are present in pools.

And among those, let's just say, human body fluids that I described a few minutes ago, there's a lot of compounds that contain organic nitrogen.

And it happens that organic nitrogen in particular reacts very rapidly with chlorine and