What to Know
Have you ever been having a beach day with the family and found yourself not even thinking when you accidentally open your mouth while you’re enjoying the water? Whether you’re a kid or an adult, it happens to the best of us, and it’s not always the greatest idea because there can be things in the water that cause dangerous contamination that may leave you extremely sick.
A thirty-five-year-old woman from the UK is speaking out after she took what she thought was an innocent dip in the sea only to become violently ill approximately 10 days later with a parasite. Frighteningly, she lost over 30 lbs throughout the course of her illness and “survived” on a liquid diet.
A beach day during a heatwave sounds like a good idea, right? In this case, it was this woman’s biggest mistake.
During a brutal heatwave in the UK, a woman named Katherine Hopkins, 35, who worked as a tattoo artist in East Sussex for some time, decided to cool off by swimming in the sea for several days in a row near Brighton, according to People. She also went for a swim at Lancing Beach in West Sussex, per the magazine.
Approximately 10 days after her first beach swim, Katherine started to experience intense stomach cramps and watery diarrhea that got very serious quite quickly.
“I was going to the toilet 20 to 30 times and I was so dehydrated. When I tried to drink water, it would just come straight out. I was nearly fainting, I was hot and feverish. I threw up once. I thought I had food poisoning, but I hadn’t eaten anything to cause that,” Katherine recalled.
Katherine “genuinely thought” she was going to die and felt utterly “helpless” throughout her mystery illness, per People.
A trip to the hospital confirmed that she had a parasite from swimming in the sea.
As someone who received a kidney transplant in 2010, which left her more vulnerable to illness, Katherine decided to go to the hospital where she was eventually diagnosed with cryptosporidiosis, which is a a diarrheal disease caused by the parasite Cryptosporidium, per People.
When she arrived at the hospital, Katherine recalls that she was looking “yellow and gray,” and her “kidney function was deteriorating rapidly,” per the magazine. After being treated for a month, the 35-year-old was eventually discharged, but she ended up losing 35 lbs throughout her illness and “survived” on a liquid diet. How horrible.
She notes that it will probably be months before her stomach issues fully subside and she remains on a “restricted diet.”
She warns others to be aware that swimming at public beaches does come with a risk.
In the end, Katherine believes that she contracted the parasite that made her so sick by ingesting seawater that could have been “contaminated,” People reported. But one of the scarier aspects to consider is that when she visited the beach in Sussex, there was no reports of contaminated water.
“[The seawater] didn’t look visibly dirty. Brighton sea always looks a bit murky. There were no signs saying ‘don’t swim here.’ There were kids in the water,” she said.
After experiencing such a dreadful illness, Katherine has vowed to never swim in British waters again. “I was really angry. I’m never going swimming in the sea in the U.K. again. I think the beach should be shut off — there were so many kids swimming in there, and God forbid if they were to get this,” she explained via People.
She never thought that she would “go in the sea and contract a parasite,” and she just hopes that people take caution to avoid what she had to go through.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, Cryptosporidium is a protozoan parasite that spreads through contaminated feces gets in your mouth. One of the most common ways this occurs is through untreated water from a lake or swimming pool. Common symptoms to watch out for are water diarrhea which can be severe, stomach pains and cramping, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, and low fever.
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