Medicine: Yes, My Darling Daughter

Last week medical opinion hinted that, barring tumbles, the bathtub may be the safest place for summer bathing:

¶The New York World-Telegram was whooping up its favorite hot-weather story: pollution of Manhattan’s beaches. The U.S. Public Health Service, said the World-Telegram, considers any water with a count of more than 1,000 coliform bacteria (pollution by sewage) per 100 cubic centimeters (a large mouthful) unfit for bathing. Samples from Coney Island and Staten Island ran above 6,900. The East River hit 69,000.

¶Even swimming pools filled with filtered, chlorinated water are not too safe. For seven years Dr. J. Roswell Gallagher kept track of boys who swam and those who didn’t in the Phillips Academy pool at Andover, Mass. Number of hospital admissions for respiratory tract infections was 14% greater among the swimmers, he reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. Acute sinusitis was almost twice as high; mumps and measles spread more rapidly among the swimmers. But the total number of days spent in the hospital was about the same for swimmers and nonswimmers: the boys who didn’t catch cold in the pool got banged up playing basketball or wrestling.