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Baba
Full of poop and pee: swimming pools
Namaskar,
This is a letter about cleanliness. In so-called civilized society, or so-called civilized countries, you will see that there are swimming pools everywhere. And swimming pools are very dirty places. You can imagine that in the Western World, swimming pools are very common. And after going to the toilet, people in those countries do not generally use water to clean their bottom. And in certain areas where people do wash their bottom with water, they still don’t wash their urinary gland after urination. Due to this remaining urine in the gland comes out into the water of the pool. And many urinate in the swimming pool outrightly.
Body smells like skunk or billy goat
Above all, in general course the human body exudes various smelly secretions from the various exocrine glands such as under the arms, the groin, the general sweat glands of the skin, etc. And many people also don’t take bath regularly; some go many days without a bath. In some religions people bath once in a week. And among those who are not religious, some go a whole month without bathing. In addition, most of the population is meat eating-- and due to this their body emanates a putrid and offensive smell. It is sometimes even more smelly than a skunk or billy goat. And the number of humans having a bad smell like this is not few. When such persons go swimming in a public pool, all of this accumulated dirt and grime washes off into the pool.
Lots of stool and urine from the swimmers
As mentioned above, people in many so-called developed countries do not generally use water to clean their bottom.
So when such people go in the swimming pool, waste residue which was there on their bottom naturally washes off into the water. And the chlorine gas which is used in most swimming pools to clean the water, is not enough to do the job as there are many bacteria which chlorine cannot get. Recently scientists have found in their research that in swimming pools there is a lot of stool and urine from the swimmers. And it is significant here that swimming pool water is not regularly changed-- even years go by without changing it due to the quantity of water involved. What to speak of 1-2 years, it is often 5 years before the water gets changed. And that extremely dirty water like sewage, containing so much urine and stool residue, touches the swimmers' lips and often enters their mouths. And sometimes small children swallow it also, with the attendant risk of illness and disease.
Conclusion
Ananda Margiis have to follow yama and niyama. And among the points of yama and niyama is that of shaoca. So those who are strict Margiis, should think twice before stepping in swimming pools. Indeed one can easily get a test done to check how much stool and urine is in the water. Below please see the below paragraphs from the newspaper which contains further important information on this topic.
Being a Margii, we should follow shaoca. And propagate the idea and importance of cleanliness among others as well.
Namaskar,
In Him
Svara’t’a
Bad smell arises in the body
Ananda Marga philosophy guides us, “Due to the accumulation of dead protoplasmic cells, a bad smell arises in the body. The reason for this is not taking a proper bath and washing away the dead cells. In certain animals and plants, due to the secretion of smelly hormones, an unpleasant odour is emitted from the body. Everyone should take a bath at regular intervals to clean the body and eat vegetarian food.” (1)
Let’s start with the gross stuff: up to ten grams of poop can wash off a little kid’s butt in a pool. Ten grams is a pretty small amount, but now multiply that by the number of children in your average public pool. Think about how much poop that is. And now think about the last time you got an infection from swimming in a pool. Was it last summer? The summer before that? To be fair, young kids are far more likely to get sick because they end up swallowing the water, so think back to when you were little. Anything? Probably not. Even if you spent most of your childhood in public pools, odds are you never got seriously ill from the bacteria and parasites in there.
To be clear: it’s not because pools are clean. Pools are awful. They’re full of poop and pee and probably some blood to round it all out, and lots of them don’t have the proper amount of disinfecting agents. 17 percent of people say they’ve peed in a public pool before (and let’s be honest, if 17 percent are willing to admit it, there have to be way more people who aren't).
The Centers for Disease Control just put out a memo noting that Cryptosporidium outbreaks doubled from 16 in 2014 to 32 in 2016. Crypto causes about half of all outbreaks of gastrointestinal problems caught in recreational waters. That number rises to about 80 percent if you only look at treated water sources (i.e. not lakes, ponds, or rivers) because it's one of the few microorganisms that can survive chlorine. We chlorinate pools because, when dissolved in water, chlorine breaks down into two chemicals that destroy microorganisms’ protective walls: hypochlorous acid and hypochlorite ions. Crypto has a thick coating on it that doesn’t allow chlorine to break through, so it persists even if pools are properly chlorinated. All it takes is some little kid to go swimming too soon after having an infection to spread crypto to the whole pool.
And if the pool doesn’t have the right balance of disinfecting chemicals, crypto isn’t all you have to worry about. You can catch pus-filled rashes from Pseudomonas, a fever and cough from Legionella, diarrhea from Shigella, diarrhea from Giardia, diarrhea from Norovirus, or diarrhea from E. coli. Some of these bacteria are chlorine-resistant, some aren’t. The point is that public pools are full of microorganisms just dying to give you the runs. (Credit: http://www.popsci dot com/swimming-pools-are-gross)
References
1. “Questions and Answers on Microvita – Excerpt B”, Microvitum in a Nutshell
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