FOR thousands of swimmers each year, a trip to the swimming pool means a bout
of diarrhoea, stomach cramps and fever. The culprit is often contamination with
faeces containing the protozoan Cryptosporidium, which is often brought
to the pool by sick babies. Now chemists Ric Pashley and Marilyn Karaman of the
Australian National University in Canberra have identified a crystalline
material that mops up the infectious form of the organism and destroys it.
So infectious is “crypto” that a single infected individual has the potential
to make up to 100 000 others ill. And while most infected people recover, crypto…
