The CDC notes that small children can have up to 10 grams of stool stuck to their butts at any point, according to some crack scientific modeling. That's about 10 standard paperclips worth of excrement. And small children tend to stand directly over jets, allowing any fecal matter stuck on their bums to wash out of their swim diapers—which do not trap poop. Some splash pads recirculate water. And among the kids who aren't standing on the jets, there are others putting their open mouths over them.

Once infectious material gets into the water, disinfection systems that aren't working properly or are inadequate can allow pathogens to gush from every nozzle. Splash pads aren't unique in having to handle sick children in poopy swim diapers—but they are unique in how they are regulated. That is, in some places, they're not regulated at all. Splash pads are designed to not have standing water, therefore reducing the risk of young children drowning. But, because they lack standing water, they are sometimes deemed exempt from local health regulations. //

The primary method for keeping recreational water free of infectious viruses and bacteria is chlorinating it. However, maintaining germ-killing chlorine concentration is especially difficult for splash pads because the jets and sprays aerosolize chlorine, lowering the concentration.

Still, in most splash-pad linked outbreaks, standard chlorine concentrations aren't enough anyway. The most common pathogen to cause an outbreak at splash pads is the parasite Cryptosporidium, aka Crypto. The parasite's hardy spores, called oocysts, are extremely tolerant of chlorine, surviving in water with the standard chlorine concentration (1 ppm free chlorine) for over seven days. (Other germs die in minutes.) In splash pads that might not even have that standard chlorine concentration, Crypto flourishes and can cause massive outbreaks.

In 2023, the CDC recommended new health codes that call for "secondary disinfection" methods to keep Crypto at bay, including disinfection systems using ozone or ultraviolet light. Another possible solution is to have "single-pass" splash pads that don't recirculate water. //

scarletjinx Ars Scholae Palatinae
4y
1,055
Subscriptor
Ah, as gross as this is (thank you Beth), if you kinda think through the numbers - 25 years of data, 60 outbreaks (2.4/year) - with most likely tens of millions of children playing in those splash pools in that 25 year period. 10k vs 10's of millions. Then looking at hospital visits - ~150 & 99 ER visits; yet there are over 200,000 ER visits from playground accidents each year by comparison.

Not a significant risk at all.

Look, any parent will tell you - kids are basically little petri dishes. They bring home colds & such from school & other venues, etc; germs from playing in playgrounds, pools, sandboxes. It's a thing, and the only recourse for the germophobes would be to raise the kid in a bubble with no contact to anything. Which might bring its own health problems.

That being said, I probably wouldn't have let my kid play in water where other kids with diapers were playing, that is kinda gross. If you got a kid in diapers perhaps be considerate of others and let your kid play in a home kiddie pool, not in a public space. But many people aren't considerate of others, look at a movie theater floor sometime after the lights come on.