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What’s In the Swimming Pool Water?

And the scary part is that they only tested for 32 chemicals, but there are thousands of others they didn't test for that could be lurking in the water, including pesticides used on the lawns and grounds around outdoor swimming pools. From Science Daily:

Pharmaceuticals, personal care products could taint swimming pools

A new study suggests pharmaceuticals and chemicals from personal care products end up in swimming pools, possibly interacting with chlorine to produce disinfection byproducts with unknown properties and health effects.

Chlorination is used primarily to prevent pathogenic microorganisms from growing. Previous research has shown that many constituents of urine including urea, uric acid, and amino acids, interact with chlorine to produce potentially hazardous disinfection byproducts in swimming pools. However, chemicals from pharmaceuticals and personal care products, or PPCPs, also could be interacting with chlorine, producing potentially harmful byproducts. There are literally thousands of chemicals from pharmaceuticals and personal care products that could be getting into swimming pool water.

A research group led by Ching-Hua Huang, a professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has developed an analytical technique that identifies and quantifies 32 pharmaceuticals and personal care products in water... Water samples were taken from indoor swimming pools in Indiana and Georgia.

Of the 32 chemicals investigated, the researchers detected three: N,N-diethyl-m-toluamide, known as DEET, the active ingredient in insect repellants; caffeine; and tri(2-chloroethyl)-phosphate (TCEP), a flame retardant.

"The other 29 could have been present at concentrations below the detection level," Blatchley said. "And because there are literally thousands of pharmaceuticals, this is just a small subset of compounds that could be present in swimming pools. The main issue is that the release of chemicals into a place like a swimming pool is completely uncontrolled and unknown. I don't want to be an alarmist. We haven't discovered anything that would be cause for alarm right now, but the bottom line is we just don't know."

Some chemicals are volatile, which means they can escape into the air to be inhaled. Others can be ingested or absorbed through the skin."Swimmers are exposed to chemicals through three different routes: You can inhale, you can ingest and it can go through your skin. So the exposure you receive in a swimming pool setting is potentially much more extensive than the exposure you would receive by just one route alone," Blatchley said.

His previous research has shown that certain airborne contaminants are created when chlorine reacts with sweat and urine in indoor swimming pools. Pharmaceuticals may get into swimming pool water from personal care products applied to the skin such as insect repellant, makeup and sunscreen. Many pharmaceuticals that are ingested are not fully metabolized by the body and are excreted in sweat and urine.

"Urine, I think, is really the primary mode of introduction," Blatchley said. "When it comes to pharmaceuticals, these are chemicals designed to be biologically active at pretty low concentrations. Birth control pills, for example, contain hormones. If those chemicals and others are present, especially in a mixture in a water sample that humans are going to be exposed to, then what are the consequences of that? That is a largely unanswered question."...The previous research suggested that about 93 percent of uric acid introduced to pools comes from human urine.