Citation

Janson S. Acta Paediatr. 2020; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/apa.15674

PMID

33301198

Abstract

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 372 000 fatal drownings were reported globally in 2014. It stated that 90% of these occurred in low‐income and middle‐income countries, where the drowning rate was more than three times higher than in high‐income countries. Over half of the people who drowned were under 25 years of age. For children aged 1‐14 years, drowning is one of the top five causes of death and it is the main cause of accidental deaths for children under five years of age.1 As a comparison, the drowning death toll is almost two‐thirds that of malnutrition. A 2020 paper from China on social and environmental risk factors for accidental drowning among children exemplified the current situation. The authors reported that most of the children who drowned were boys and 70% lived within 100 metres of a body of water. Drowning primarily occurred in ponds, canals, rivers and wells, and over 90% of those bodies of waters had no safety measures. Almost 90% of primary caregivers did not provide full‐time care for the children, and 80% had no knowledge of first aid skills for resuscitation.

Deaths from drowning are preventable and this fact has been demonstrated by Swedish injury data. In the early part of the 1990s, about 100 children per year drowned compared to 10 per year in the most recent decades, corresponding to 0.55 per 100 000 child population. Child drowning has shown a much steeper decrease than drowning in adults. This is especially true for children under 10 years of age, who nowadays constitute only a few per cent of all drowning deaths in Sweden. Similar improvements are occurring throughout the world, particularly in high‐income countries. An analysis of the WHO mortality database showed marked reductions, of between 13% and 80%, in unintentional drowning among children and adolescents during 2000‐2013 in 20 of the 21 middle‐income and high‐income countries. Drowning in natural bodies of water was the primary cause in most countries, except for drowning in pools in the USA and in bathtubs in Japan...

Language: en