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Abstract
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The number of international visitors to Spain has risen from 60 million in 2013 to 78 million in 2017. Tourism is one of Spain's main sources of income. While drowning is the second cause of accidental death 1 , after transport accidents, we have very little information about the attitudes, behaviours and water safety knowledge of the foreign tourist who come to Spain every year. International research into drowning2,3 suggests that tourists have a higher risk of drowning than locals. It is estimated that 70% of Europeans4 spend their holidays close to water and drowning is the third highest cause reaching up to 36% of fatalities of tourist injury, 15 times greater than for local residents (15 versus 1/100000 person/year) 5. Data from some studies report that British children 6 are at greater risk of drowning when on holiday overseas than they are in UK, and that 72% of hospitalized children in Portugal due to a drowning incident were visitors7. Canary Island visitors' also account 34.70% of total spinal injuries8.
Method
From our collection of 3758 drowning incidents in Spain, with a total of 4736 victims, between January 1st, 2013 and August 15th, 2018, we extracted 819 cases (21.79%), resulting in 981 (20.71%) victims. This selection did attend to those victims who had been classified as "foreign visitor" (832 - 88.47%) or "foreign resident" (149 - 15.13%) -when it comes to foreigners with habitual residence in Spain.
Findings
Of the 981 people studied, 710 (72.38%) were male and 259 (26.40%) female. A total of 581 (59.23%) people suffered a fatal drowning, of which 448 (45.67%) were men and 133 (13.56%) women. Up to 14.68% of the victims were transferred to hospital. Fatal drowning numbers of foreign residents are higher (77.18%), but there were fewer who needed hospital care (4.78%). Beaches are the places where there are more incidents: 73.35% and drowning with fatal outcome are reported: 73.15%. Pools gather 10.76% of the incidents with the 10.84% of deaths, while inland water have 10.05% of incidents with 12.90% of the fatalities.
Recreational swimming 56.47% was the most common in-water activity, and 16.11% of people were around water but without doing a water-related activity (suffering accidental or unexpected falls). Although the aquatic environment conditions were not reported in 54.42% of cases, water conditions (like rip current, dumping waves) was the main cause of the incidents 20.61%, followed by accident, accidental fall or dive in 16.04%. Red flag flew in 11.27% of the cases for 10.66% with yellow flag. Incidents were mostly detected by an untrained witness (44.57%) or companions (30.86%) rather than by Lifeguards (20.30%), while the extraction of the water was performed almost equally by lifeguards (25.89%), witness (24.87%) or emergency services (25.69%).
Once rescued, 44.67% were reported as drowning with water aspiration, 19.80% of cases were classified as "possibly drowning" (meaning that drowning could have been triggered by a previous issue as heart attack -AMI- or cerebrovascular accident -CVA-) and 18.58% of victims were rescue in loss of aquatic control (affecting breathing, displacement or flotation, but without signs of aspiration or respiratory impairment).
63.76% of victims were at unguarded beaches or locations where the surveillance was not possible or present. On guarded environments 30.15% incidents happened during the supervised hours, whilst 5.38% were out of the surveillance schedule. Lifeguards performed 22.54% of CPR interventions; 24.26% of victims had no CRP and 22.03% were recovered already as a corpse.
Language: en |