See? I knew there was something wrong about swimming babies. Give me enough time and I'll dig up the proof to anything. No, seriously, this article just popped up. Who knew that Germany was studying the effects of early swimming on the health of babies?

It turns out there are several effects linked to baby-swimming that you may want to avoid and can avoid simply by keeping your baby out of public pools for the first year:

The dreaded ear infection, colds, and diarrhea. Avoid this trifecta at all costs!

A study was made of about 2100 six-year olds whose medical histories were examined against their swimming histories. Children who didn't swim regularly in their first year had a lower risk of having had the aforementioned maladies. (I won't go into what they said about asthma, which was the reverse of what you'd expect, but researchers figure that asthmatic babies likely wouldn't be taken to the pool in the first place, so the fact that the non-swimming babies had a higher incidence of asthma is, they feel, circumstantial. Oops, I went into it. Oh well).

The reason for the higher incidence of illness?

Yummy pathogens brought into pools by non-bathing swimmers. In other words, in public pools you're swimming in other people's crap, mucous, and skin flakes (mm, that makes you want to hop right into a pool, doesn't it?). And since babies have less-developed immune systems, they can't handle the crap and mucous and skin flakes as well as we adults can, so they get sick.

[cough] I'm feeling kind of sick right now, thank you.

Bottom line, wait a bit before getting your baby into the (public) pool.