Charlie Clarke fell severely ill in late summer 2023 after a swim at Clevedon Marine Lake in southwest England while training for a Triathlon. The next day he collapsed on the street near his home and was taken to the hospital, where after a series of tests he was diagnosed with myocarditis — an inflammation of his heart muscle caused by an infection.
The diagnosis was a shock for Clarke, an otherwise healthy 28-year old designer, and he had to stop training. It took him about six months to do sports again and a whole year to get back to the same level of fitness. Since then, he has been “very cautious” and so far only trained in pools. He pulled out of a triathlon in September on the morning of the event after he learned of a recent sewage spill at the beach where the swim was taking place.
Clarke’s story is one of many showing how severe the impact of Britain’s sewage crisis can be on everyday life. As the weather turns warmer, the swimming season is getting underway, and although spills were supposed to become fewer, they’ve worsened. Untreated sewage entered English waters for a record 3.61 million hours last year — a result of aging infrastructure which sends rain and wastewater from toilets and kitchens through the same pipes and often overflows into rivers and seas.
Read more: UK Water Bosses Face Up to Two Years in Prison for Polluting
The depth of the health problem is still unknown, even as campaigners such as Surfers Against Sewage attempt to track thousands of cases of sewage-related sickness. The issue became a key battleground in last year’s election, with waterways playing an important role in the economic and community life of the island nation. Frustration over their degradation is likely to be even higher this summer after water bills were hiked as much as 47% in April to help curb pollution.
“The fundamental issue is that water companies just waited too long to invest,” said Kevin Grecksch, a social scientist and lecturer in the University of Oxford’s school of geography and the environment. “Now they’re playing a game of catch up, which they can’t win.”
One doctor that Bloomberg spoke to for this story, who asked not to be identified discussing patients publicly, said that sewage-related illnesses have increased since April when it was warm enough for more people to swim in the sea. They said that about one in 10 patients calling the Cornwall-based doctor’s surgery for advice are reporting symptoms related to ingesting sewage and have been in the sea recently.
