Every summer, Sweden's municipalities report harmful bacterial levels from a large number of Swedish bathing areas to the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management. Water quality for the 2023 bathing season is determined by samples reported during the last four bathing seasons, 2019-2022.
461 Swedish bathing areas are so-called EU bathing areas, which means, among other things, that they have an average of 200 bathers or more per day and that bathing water quality is regularly monitored. This year, the water quality at 421 of the EU baths has been classified as excellent, good or satisfactory, which corresponds to about 91%.
Advice against bathing
Twelve of the EU baths have classified bathing water quality as poor. Half are located in Lake Mälaren in Stockholm and several in Skåne, two of which are in Helsingborg municipality.
"All municipalities carry out investigations in their own way to locate the sources of pollution if they can find specific causes of what it is that pollutes the water, so there is no single cause that unites them with each other," says Ema Glad, investigator at the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management.
If the baths should show good quality in newly taken samples, the advice still applies to dipping throughout the summer, until the bath can be classified with at least satisfactory quality.
28 EU baths could not be classified due to missing or insufficient samples.
Less polluted bathing water in 2022
In sampling, two types of indicator bacteria that come from faeces are measured. In 2021, test results from 117 individual samples at bathing areas in unfit water showed, last year the figure dropped to 64.
According to Ema Glad, it is difficult to say what the decrease is due to. But there are many different reasons why the bacteria end up in the bathwater, she explains:
"Sometimes it is people in animals in direct contact, sometimes it is stormwater and widening that are the culprit.
Three risks in bathing water – hear Ema Glad tell you more in the video above.