I didn't have any clue where to post this, so hopefully The Deep End is ok.

Has anyone ever heard of this??

Rapid and Severe Tooth Erosion from Swimming
in an Improperly Chlorinated Pool: Case Report

http://www.cda-adc.ca/JCDA/vol-74/issue-4/359.pdf

What a flawed study. They didn't even have pool water to test. They assumed it was a CYA stabilized pool, which it probably was but they don't even know for sure. And who maintains a pool at a ph of 3? What exactly does chlorine have to do with ph anyway in such a case? Assuming that a stabilized pool was so low in ph as to cause extreme tooth enamel failure without a water test is preposterous and hardly worth the time spent to publish the paper.

What's the follow up on this woman? Anything? The paper suggests it will not be a problem anymore but it did not say that they actually had results.

Pure ridiculosity... Flawed results. The paper itself states that this is the ONLY case reported so far. Hardly enough to warrant an assumption that it was an untested pool to blame. Out of the billions and billions of people who swim in improperly chlorinated stabilized pools that have low ph's and didn't know it... only one 72 year old woman had tooth enamel loss... EVER????

Found some more

This one tested the water and found ph of 2.7

http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=we ... sPcTcF-6-g

Colgate:

http://www.colgate.com/app/CP/US/EN/OC/ ... ivity.cvsp

And, if you ever swim in Thailand...

http://www.cphs.chula.ac.th/J%20Health% ... _91_94.pdf

Of course, in all these cases the pool PH was way too low.

If anything, just a reminder of how important it is to keep your pool balanced, but kind of pointless as everyone at TFP already knows this (or soon will, if they are new here)

I wouldn't call a PH of 2.7 "way too low", I would call it "way way way way too too too too low".

Do you mean a different article than that one? I couldn't find that reference to 2.7 anywhere (I even used search for 2.7 in case I missed it).

The article referenced above actually gives the previous article even less credibility as it was published in 1983 (so Cuba hotel swimmer was NOT the only case so far) and it also clearly states:
"Tooth enamel does not decalcify in acidic solutions unless the pH is below 6.0 (6). Even at a pH between 5 and 6, hours of cumulative exposure are required for clinically evident decalcification to occur (6)."

Cuba swimming lady swam for a couple weeks, a few hours a day and as she swam she got water in her mouth and spit it out. This says she would have had to soak her teeth in the pool water for hours on end to get clinically evident decalcification. Her teeth degraded a lot for the amount of time she swam in the untested pool. It was well beyond "clinically evident".

What's interesting about the second paper is that they at least went back and asked at the pool for records to try to figure out what happened. There were none really, and no one tested ph after the daily test showed "lower than 6.8" to verify that their additions had actually raised ph properly. There is no way to know what the ph of that pool's water actually was during the time of the tooth enamel issues (1982). There ARE a high number of cases reported from that same pool so it's evident that something was going wrong and that the ph was regularly found to be low when they opened and tested the pool for the day.

Edit: oops, the 2.7 reference was from the second link, not the first. But it still didn't reference a tested pool of 2.7, it just stated that pool water between ph of 2.7 and 7 that tooth enamel erosion is probable. The Thailand pools however... DID have low ph of 3.2something and 2.97 or something like that. How the heck does someone swim in that and not have skin irritation too?

Not arguing with the possibilities..., obviously low ph can cause enamel loss. I just didn't like the first paper. They didn't write a paper that had much basis, and that I could believe. That always makes me discount a paper's results. Studies should be based on facts, that one had very few actual facts.

From the first link in my second post

"A water sample, obtained from the pool in September by one of the swimmers and tested by Virginia's Consolidated State Laboratories, exhibited no buffering capacity and a pH of 2.7, i.e., an acid concentration approximately 100,000 times that recommended for swimming pools"

By the way, I agree with you that the first article really didn't appear too scientific, or well researched - to be expected I guess, since it was written by a dental expert, not a pool/water expert.

Ah... ok. Found it. Sorry, funny that searching for "2.7" didn't find it, but when I searched the first three words of that quote it showed right up. TY!

It also says there was no buffering capacity... does that mean 0 alkalinity?

ROTFLMAO at the idea of a pool having a ph of under 3......

You know what is even funnier? Coca Cola has a ph of 2.5 and I'd bet WAY more people have that exposed to their teeth than a swimming pool at 3.

And NASTY, "regularly took in mouthfuls of water, which she spat out between strokes" EW!!! I wouldn't do that in MY pool, much less a public pool.

IMO, a vegetarian diet is horrid for teeth. Weston Price documented that native peoples that regularly consumed fatty acids (from animal products) had great teeth. I bet that was more to blame for her **** teeth than swimming in some nasty pool for two weeks.

Yes, it's actually negative. TA becomes zero at around a pH of 4.5 (the actual pH depends on the starting TA level and other buffers present). At lower pH, TA becomes negative since after the carbonate buffer is essentially gone (outgassed) the TA is mostly determined by [OH^-]-[H⁺] which becomes very negative at very low pH.