A SHORT HISTORY OF OCCUPATIONAL DISEASE: 3. LEISURE CAN MAKE YOU SICK.

The risk of infection associated with occupations can, and does, extend to certain leisure and sports activities. Generally, such pastimes are regarded as important for human health and mental wellbeing. However, infections may, rarely, be acquired during leisure activities that include water sports and water-related relaxation, and certain sports.

Abandoning nature: swimming pools and clean, healthy recreation in Hamilton, Ontario, c. 1930s-1950s.

Municipal swimming pools arose as a technological fix for an urban public health and recreation crisis in Hamilton when its bay became a polluted sink for residential and industrial wastes. Until World War II, city leaders and medical authorities believed that they could identify, delineate, and construct safe natural swimming areas along the bay's shore, supplemented by a few public artificial swimming pools. After the war, the pollution situation worsened. For those who couldn't travel to cleaner lakeshores elsewhere, local authorities created swimming pools, thus abandoning the natural waters of the bay to the "constructive power of the profit motive".

[Construction hygiene in the area of bathing and recreation]. / Bauhygiene im Bade- und Freizeitbereich.

Construction hygiene in the bathing and recreation areas underwent many changes during the decades. In each case it was accomplished very intensively and defined by the actual needs of the population or by those responsible for the population. With regard to the development of bathing since the Romans, the bathing habits of the Roman times, during the Middle Ages, at the 18th century, at the beginning of the 19th century and of today are characterized broadly. The respective constructional as well as the hygienic measures are also shown and discussed in this context. Whereas the Roman thermals created prerequisites for physical activity as well as possibilities for spare time, and in the early Middle Ages, sexual excesses and the risk factors connected thereby led to the transfer of infectious diseases and consequently to the elimination of the public baths. At the beginning of the 18th century first the cleaning of the body and at the beginning of the 20th century physical activity became very important. With the help of the construction plans for baths and shower-baths and swimming pools of 1906 the aims and purposes of the baths are discussed and the respective constructional changes are shown the example of warm water baths (swimming pools) in Hamburg.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)