Cryptosporidium Lawyer & Attorney : Marler Clark : Cryptosporidium Blog

By Mark Langlois THE NEWS-TIMES

DANBURY - City officials will push ahead with plans to create a spray park for Rogers Park although thousands became ill at similar parks in New York and Georgia.

Danbury leaders say the city's situation is different from the others.

The New York and Georgia parks didn't have treated municipal water and used reservoir water without treatment. They stored runoff from the sprayscape in tanks under the park and pumped it out again, so any contamination from people using the park was concentrated in the tanks.

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February 14, 2006
Newstimeslive.com
Mark Langlois

DANBURY - As the city prepares to open a spray park in Rogers Park and Highland Park in May or June, officials are researching rules and construction plans that will keep children in the park safe.

The pools at Rogers and Highland were removed after the August 6, 2004, drowning of 2-year-old girl in Rogers Park.

City voters agreed to replace the pools with sprayscapes - playgrounds where water sprays out of colorful shapes like flowers, windmills, cannons and loops However, New York State created regulations to govern the parks after contaminated water caused thousands of illnesses in upstate New York. A similar problem in 1995 hurt 5,000 people in Georgia.

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Lauren Stanforth
Staff writer
The Democrat and Chronicle

(February 10, 2006) - In the wake of one of the nation's largest waterborne parasitic outbreaks in a decade, the state Health Department has finalized regulations that for the first time will ensure health and safety at splash and spray parks.

The regulations were written as a result of a parasitic outbreak at Seneca Lake State Park Sprayground near Geneva in which more than 3,800 people fell ill between June and August 2005 with symptoms of diarrhea, nausea, fever and headache. The parasite cryptosporidium was found in the Sprayground's water tanks and likely infected visitors when they got water from the park's sprayers in their mouths.

Cryptosporidium is a parasite found in human and animal feces. The Health Department now says its investigation concluded that park patrons infected the water. As to what extent the Sprayground's filtration system played a role in the outbreak, state health spokesman Robert Kenny said that a state investigation found the filtration system was inadequate to deal with cryptosporidium.

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