It’s summer, and that means health organizations will occasionally shower Americans with reminders of how public swimming locations are basically nightmarish cesspools teeming with microbes that can burn your eyes, wreck your gut, and eat your brain.
In attempts to communicate fairly basic health advice, such as not peeing or defecating in a public swimming pool and trying to avoid swallowing toxic algae from lakes, health organizations create a mesmerizing fountain of hilarious, graphic, disturbing, awkward, and sometimes baffling advice.
Given this source of summer puking fun, here are our picks for the top five public health advice floating in the water this summer.
5. The polluted euphemism
As you’ll see in the top picks, many health organizations are diving into the poop waters first, fully embracing the fecal facts and not shying away from displaying biological wreckage. But the Virginia Department of Health is apparently too subdued for that. No, while other health organizations are sinking low, the VDH is going high, rising above the stomach-churning tides…or at least tried to.
In this valiant but ultimately unsuccessful attempt at stool decorum, the VDH offers the most squeaky clean image and most polite message – only to end it with a blunt, well, “poo”. Not “faeces” or “feces” mind you; just “poo”. It was close, but unfortunately the pristine poolside scene and quaint grandma-approved euphemism are abruptly tainted by a last-minute turd bomb.
4. Germ bombs gone
The following selection holds nothing back. It can occasionally be found around state and local health departments, but was initially flushed from the bowels of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, masters of infamous infographics.
While the ballistics factoids ostensibly relate to pool safety and the rationale of trying not to swallow pool water, the infographic functions best as a general reminder that humans are inherently filthy animals who should probably only be swimming in huge tubs of hand sanitizer.
The image “What’s in your cannonball?” catalogs the amounts of microbes in human hair, skin, poop, nose, mouth, and hands — without mentioning that many of them are actually harmless or even beneficial organisms. But that’s not all: Each pool launch fires off one to two cans of soda containing human sweat, a cup of pee, and, if you’re a kid, 10 ounces of poop.
Who’s ready to swim?
