Especially you!
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Pee is sterile in healthy people; however, people are not always healthy. (And yes, you can have bladder/urinary tract infections without necessarily knowing it, having both had one of these “stealth” infections myself, and having to notify a few different unknowing women of their own positive results for UTIs as well.)
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Pee that is sterile only remains such while enclosed in your uninfected bladder. Once it’s peed out, all bets are off.
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Pools have chemicals for a reason, to keep them clean and fit for swimming in. People get pool water in their eyes, in their mouths, accidentally swallow some, etc. It’s bad enough to ingest this, without also ingesting the urine and other things that people may intentionally or unknowingly deposit in the pool. Lax pool caretakers may not frequently test the water and correct the situation with proper dosing of pool chemicals.
We don’t have to resort to hearsay. Ryan Lochte himself said in an interview last year that all Olympic swimmers pee in the pool. I think he specified though that they pee in the warmup pool, not in the actual competition pool, because it’s not like you have much opportunity there.
If you pee hard enough it might even give you a propulsive advantage.
There really is a GQ answer to this question, and it has to do with chemistry.
Chlorine works to disinfect pools precisely because it attacks organic molecules. Microorganisms don’t have good defenses like us multicellular guys, and so they are easily killed.
Well, urine is chock full of organic molecules that react with chlorine. This causes two problems. First, some of these reactions turn chlorine into chloramines. These are largely responsible for the chlorine smell and irritation some people complain about with pools. Second, as you use up chlorine breaking down urine molecules, you now have less chlorine available to kill microorganisms. Once chlorine falls below certain levels, it stops being effective… and any excess urine turns out to be a great food source for microorganisms.
(PS: if you’re worried about squickiness, then do NOT look up how much people sweat in a pool.)
So, while urine might be sterile as it is expelled from your body, a pool of urine is not likely to remain sterile. Is that it?
W.C. Fields once said he never drank water because “fish fuck in it.”
I don’t think a couple people make much of a difference either, but who decides who those couple people will be? Does every 20th patron get a special yellow bracelet when they are admitted?
::raises hand:: So, professor — why do I smell a very, very strong chlorine smell in my bathroom when I fill up the jaccuzzi tub? Nobody’s peeing it it; I’m just filling it. Same deal in the kitchen the other day; I filled the stockpot with water to make a giant batch of steel-cut oats and … pool smell.
It’s a lot simpler to post a sign saying it’s prohibited for everyone to pee in the pool, than to say that only the first two people are allowed to pee and then everyone else has to hold it.
I’m not the professor, but it’s probably because of way your city water is treated. My grandparents water in a small city always had a chlorine smell. Some water supplies will have more than others, and different localities do different treatments.
Well, he said it was because of the pee. If my local pools are filled with the same water as my stockpot, they’d smell like my kitchen because of how the water is treated with chlorine, not because of the chemical reaction between chlorine and pee.
Do you mind if I slash you with this bucket of pure water? Except that in the pool, everyone is already wet. So your comparison is bogus.
It’s mostly the squick factor, but honestly, it can screw up the chemical balance and generate a smell if too many people do it. Best get out of the OOL to P.
But getting out of the ocean to use the urinal is silly.
I created a thread to ask about specific health consequences of urinating in a pool.
I always wondered why it was called the warmup pool.
Oh to drop a handfull of potassium permanganate in right behind him after he enters.
So, nobody yet has started singing, “Pee-in in the pool… I’m pee-in in the pool…”?
We had a small pool when I was a kid, and it was a combination of squick and humor that made my mother put up a sign for the neighborhood kids: “Don’t pee in our pool - we don’t swim in your toilet.”
Many municipal water supplies use chloramines for treatment because they are longer-lasting that chlorine itself. Here’s an overview from Wikipedia that also references why they’re not good in swimming pools.
Chloramines aren’t only created from urine. Pretty much any nitrogen-bearing compound has the potential to react with chlorine that way, but urine is going to be your leading source of nitrogen in a pool.
Yeah, basically. The urine reduces the levels of chlorine by reacting with it, and then also provides a great growth medium for microorganisms.
Belated Response: No, actually the discussion is going just the way I wanted it to anyways.
