A mystery pool pooper – or poopers – has struck again at an Invercargill, NZ swimming pool.
It is the sixth Friday in a row someone has defecated in a swimming pool at the centre.
In the first instance a “smidgen” of faeces was discovered in the leisure pool at the Splash Palace Aquatic Centre about 4.30pm.
Aquatic Centre manager Pete Thompson said swimmers had been removed from the pool and extra chlorine had been added to the water but he believed this incident to be “an unfortunate coincidence”.
“The mode is dissimilar to anything else we have had. It was a very tiny 10 cent piece-size which suggests it probably came out of a baby’s togs,” he said.
He did not know if the poos were deliberate.
“How do you prove something is deliberate unless you catch them in the act?
“I hope whoever this person is, if it’s deliberate, ceases to behave in this manner. It’s disgusting.
In Australia, some childcare centres are sending kids home with their poo and undergarments in labelled plastic bags.
If a kid stocks the lake with brown trout (in their undies), it’s a health and safety issue. There is a chance of cross-contamination in sinks and fecal matter flicking up into a worker’s eyes. So instead of putting it in the teeny tiny toilets, the childcare workers just bag the undies up, log and all, name them and put them with the other packages of joy for the parents to deal with upon pick up.
We should also spare a thought for those who live in warmer climates. There would be some serious fermentation going on in those plastic bags.
And in Washington State an 8-year-old girl received a package of animal poop, perhaps an anonymous form of bullying.
Oddly enough, there are some companies that specialize in these sort of deliveries.
When Jamie Villanueva’s daughter opened the package, she thought someone sent her chocolate ice cream.
“And when I saw it, my heart just sunk,” Villanueva said.
Her worst suspicious however, turned out to be true.
“So I opened it and inside it has feces,” Villanueva said. “A container of feces.”
The container came with a calling card from a company called “I Poop You.” According to its website it specializes in packaging and delivering animal waste as a joke.
“I get it. I have a sense of humor. I think it’s very clever of the company,” Villanueva said. “But it’s really inappropriate with children.”
There are several websites that offer poop delivery and there doesn’t seem to be any specific law against it.
To conduct the study, the scientists literally transported feces back to a lab where they fed it through a DNA sequencing machine. The technology reveals antimicrobial resistance genes and any pathogens. From this data, they are able to analyze any patterns occurring in the plane’s country of origin.
