New research has suggested that children could risk becoming asthmatic and wheezy if they regularly use indoor swimming pools.

The research was published in the British Medical Journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine and led by Alfred Bernard, a professor of toxicology at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels.

Researchers studied more than 190,000 children aged 13-14 years old across Europe from 21 countries and examined the potential relationships between the prevalence of wheezing in children – including asthma, hay fever, rhinitis and atopic eczema – and indoor chlorinated pools.

A “strong correlation” was found between the number of indoor chlorinated swimming pools in a country and the prevalence of asthma. Where there was a high density of indoor swimming pools, children were more likely to suffer from respiratory problems.

In Western Europe, researchers found that the ratio of public swimming pools to population size was, on average, one pool per 50,000 people while in Eastern Europe, there was one per 300,000 people.

The asthma rate increased 2.7 per cent and wheezing rate 3.4 per cent for every additional indoor pool.

The report concluded that the prevalence of childhood asthma and the availability of indoor swimming pools in Europe were linked through “associations that are consistent with the hypothesis implicating pool chlorine in the rise of childhood asthma.” Details: http://oem.bmjjournals.com