Abstract College athletic training rooms are equipped to respond to the health care needs of student athletes. However, athletes treated by immersion in a therapeutic whirlpool are exposed to all the bacteria that have accumulated in the water of the whirlpool. The prevalence of bacteria in an athletic training room whirlpool before and after the installation of an automated brominator was analyzed. Before installation, the microbial load in the water ranged from 3.1 × 106 to 1.1 × 107 CFU/ml at the end of a week of use. The cleaning regime reduced this load to less than 10 CFU/ml. No statistically significant relationship existed between the number of athletes using the whirlpool and the number of bacteria in the whirlpool at the end of the week (p = 0.14). Following the installation of an automated brominator, the microbial load at the end of a week of use (e.g., before cleaning) was statistically too low to measure.
Caslake et al. (Sun,) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: