Watching your child suffer from asthma is not fun. There is endless nights of being up with breathing treatments. There are the nights of worry in which your child caught something worse because he or she is more prone to infections simply by having asthma.
There are endless prescriptions between inhalers, allergy medications, antibiotics for sickness, steroids, etc. The good news is you are not alone as a parent. More than 17 million people in the United States have asthma, according to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.
The bad news is that a new study was just released linking an increase in asthma risk for those who swim a lot.
HealthDay is reporting that, "the study found that teenagers who spent more than 1,000 hours swimming in chlorinated pools, either indoors or outdoors, had more than eight times the risk of having asthma than did teens who primarily swam in pools using a copper-silver disinfecting method."
"Chlorinated pool attendance has a very significant impact on the prevalence of allergic diseases in the studied population," said lead author Alfred Bernard, a professor of toxicology and research director at Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, Belgium, with HealthDay reporting.
"When used properly, [chlorine] is an efficient and safe disinfectant for swimming pools. However, when too much chlorine is added to water or builds up in the air of indoor pools, there is unavoidably some irritation of the organs of the bather in contact with the water and air," he explained. "There is now increasing evidence that these irritating effects may be detrimental to the airways of regular swimmers, especially the children who are the most vulnerable and the most frequent attendees of chlorinated pools."
As someone who has been around the pool business for years, I can attest that it is easy to get the levels off on chlorine. the results of this study is expected to be published in the Sept. 14 issue of Pediatrics.
The actual numbers of this study scares me. We spend a lot of time in the pool during the summer months and we have long been believers that chlorine is the best product to use. There was an 80 percent increase risk of having asthma in some of the case studies.
While they are cautioning that this is a preliminary study, the results are troubling to me since I already have one asthmatic kid.
While it is impossible to exclude or disallow your kids from swimming, there are some precautions. Don't over-chlorinate your pool. Look into alternatives. There are some new saltwater alternatives that makes the water look just as lovely.
Have your kids shower before and after swimming. Never chlorinate your pool around the kids but do it when no one is swimming. Hire a professional to clean your pool and do the chemicals.
I know next summer I will be more cautious about the amount of exposure I give my own kids. Asthma flare ups are not fun to live through so I will do whatever it takes to limit them.
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