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Health & Safety for the Public and Pool Staff The UK does not have any formal standards for pool water treatment system design, or product certification, this is contrary to the rest of Europe that employ the DIN standards or its equivalent. This has lead to poor water quality and atmospheric conditions in public swimming pools in the UK, and the use of products that are either ineffectual or potentially dangerous. 90% of the work by Dryden Aqua is in countries complying with the DIN norm, we therefore know that the public and the pool staff are placed at greater risk in the UK in comparison to pools throughout the rest of Europe. We are seeing incidents with crushed glass filter media and serious disease risks resulting from the use of surfactant products destabilizing the filters. By way of example, swimming pools are responsible for the majority or cryptosporidiosis incidents with some 3500 cases every year, the real figure is probably 10 times this value. The water quality and atmospheric conditions in the UK would not be accept by the rest of Europe, Dryden Aqua are therefore working to develop new modified DIN standard for the UK Cryprosporidium  The UK swimming pool industry level of parasitic infections are around 10 times higher than Germany. UK Cryptosporidium Reference unit state that most of the Crypto incidents in the UK are due to public swimming pools (approx. 3500 / year). The actual level may be much higher.
Confirmed incident rates per 100,000 population for cryptosporidium, 1.6 Germany, 9.3 UK. Based in the Milwaukee Cryptosporidium outbreak, the mortality rate is approximately 1 in 400. Most of the AFM systems are private but we have several hundred public pools now operating. Dryden Aqua system will not stop crypto out-breaks in the pool. However our design kills crypto and prevents its transmission. Over the last 10 years there has not been a single incident in a Dryden Aqua pool. Some examples of potentially dangerous products presently being used Crushed Glass There have been several major public health issues regarding companies passing off crushed glass as equivalent to AFM, please be advised that AFM and crushed glass are completely different and should not be confused. Filter media will escape the filter and enter the pool, and if you use crushed glass in your filter then you must empty and clean the pool if any of the filter media escapes. When AFM escapes the filter, you just treat it like sand and vacuum it off the floor without the need to empty the pool. Report by the UK Institute of Swimming pool Engineers AFM s a registered Trade Mark and has been through a major research and development project with the European Commission and the UK Government authorities and has been tested for almost 20 years. AFM� is certified under Regulation 31 of the UK Drinking Water inspectorate, AFM is compliance with European Water Directive (98/83/EC) & (80/778/EEC) and is manufactured under ISO9001-2008 quality in accordance to and certified to BSEN12902 and BSEN 12904. Dryden Aqua provide a crushed glass product called WormAway as a soil conditioner to kill worms on airports, however if we were to offer crushed glass we would be in breach of the Helsinki Convention on Water and Health of which swimming pools are included and the UK is a signatory. Surfactants (check product label) such as cleaning agents and chemical blankets Surfactants prevent flocculation and coagulation reactions working properly which prevents the filters from working. Concentrations of chlorine reaction product, exotoxins and endotoxins will increase. There is also a risk that the sand filters will dump high levels cryptosporidium oocysts or bacteria back into the water. If you see cloudy water, get out of the pool, It is likely to be bacterial toxins. Dead bacteria and bits of bacteria cell wall are almost as dangerous as living bacteria, but they are not monitored in public pools. Pools should monitor ATP (adenosine triphosphate) concentrations as an indication of toxins in the water. Another issue is that liquid organic surfactants may contain up to 95% alcohol or organic solvents, if the surfactant was accidentally dropped into the chlorine dosing tank, it could potentially create an explosion that could take down the building. click here for a video of a chlorine alcohol explosion Bromine Bromine displaces iodine from the body and seriously disrupts endocrine (hormone) system, it is also carcinogenic and implicated in renal tumors. While chlorine is also toxic it does not displace iodine from your thyroid gland, bromine is perhaps an order of magnitude higher on the toxicity scale and should not be considered for pools or Spas. Chemical impurities and contamination It is an accepted belief that products used for swimming pools do not need to be of as high a quality as products used for drinking water. This is completely wrong, the quality of swimming pool water must be much better than drinking water because most of the toxic chemicals are volatile dissolved gases. When you breath in a chemical, there are 70 square meters of lung surface area available to absorb the chemical. If you were to consume the chemical it is still not good but most toxic chemicals will be bound up in organic matter and will pass through your body, or are metabolized by your liver, this is not the case when you breath in a toxic gas. Next time you use your flocculent, if it smells like disinfectant (TCP) it is probably due to high levels of phenols because many pool products are made from chemical waste. Phenols are poisonous and carcinogenic and have no place in swimming pool water. UVc irradiation The equipment eliminates trichloramines but chlorine consumption will increase by a factor of 2 to 4 times and form a higher concentration of volatile extremely toxic chlorine reaction products such as cyanogen chloride. Sun-light and UV through photolysis will consume chlorine and form disinfection by-products such as THM`s and cyanogen chloride, this is why cyanuric acid is often used in out-door pools, but cyanuric acid acts as a food source for bacteria which means you end up using more chlorine. To avoid the problem use ACO for out-door pools . We do not advocate the use of UV irradiation of chlorinated water, however ACO reduces the side effects of the UV irradiation of chlorinated water. Also, UV will never be 100% effective against all bacteria and other organisms. Bacteria will evolve in the system through natural selection over as short a period as a few weeks. It has been identified that mutated bacterial or viral human pathogens could be produced by Uvc irradiation in recycled systems and may be implicated in a pandemic infection. UV is no longer being used in many recycle fish culture systems because of the potential disease issues, yet it is being aggressively pushed by the UK pool industry. Dryden Aqua manufacture UV equipment but it is our opinion that the systems are potentially very dangerous in chlorinated swimming pools.
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