Concern for potential transmission of the wart virus via swimming pools and/or swimming pool-related paraphernalia (e.g., towels, kick boards) is a recurring issue for Ottawa parents, teachers, and coaches and for health care and public health professionals.

The Statistics on Warts in Ottawa

Several investigations are centered around increased cases of warts among Ottawa children in the context of recreational swimming. Although biologically plausible, epidemiologic studies have failed to demonstrate conclusively how, or under what circumstances, recreational swimming might facilitate the wart virus transmission. In fact, some studies failed to find an association between swimming pool use and virus transmission altogether. Several studies that did implicate swimming pool use with warts neglected to adequately account for other factors that could introduce bias or influence virus transmission, such as the age of the subjects, their participation in other forms of physical activity (i.e., contact sports), and their shared use of potential fomites (towels, kick boards).

An additional issue complicating the interpretation of wart transmission studies is the widely variable incubation time from infection to development of warts (range, 2 weeks to 6 months), making the association between the event and wart difficult to confirm.

It remains unclear whether contact with contaminated fomites is important (i.e., kick boards, towels) or whether swimming in potentially contaminated water alone is sufficient for virus transmission.