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Abstract
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Drowning is a preventable cause of premature mortality and was estimated to cause of 236 000 deaths globally in 2019. In WHO's European region, drowning was estimated to have resulted in the deaths of 19 444 people in 2019, a mortality rate of 2·1 per 100 000. This rate is lower than the global rate of 3·1 per 100 000 population, and the second lowest of any of the WHO regions, only higher than the rate of 1·8 per 100 000 in WHO's region of the Americas.
However, such regional level data conceals the heterogeneity of drowning burden and context at a country level. Work undertaken to map the epidemiology of unintentional fatal drowning burden across the 53 member states of the WHO European region has revealed extreme variability in drowning rates, ranging from 6·7 per 100 000 people in Latvia to a low of 0·3 per 100 000 people in Iceland and Luxembourg.
Variability is also seen in drowning mortality by sex and age in WHO's 2019 estimates. Drowning rates for men are as high as 11·3 per 100 000 people in Latvia, 10·2 in per 100 000 people Belarus and 9·8 per 100 000 people in Ukraine. By contrast, drowning rates among women are much lower, with the highest rates observed in Tajikistan (3·7 per 100 000 people), Latvia (2·7 per 100 000 people), and Lithuania (2·4 per 100 000 people). In many countries of the WHO European region, drowning was a top ten leading cause of death for children and people younger than 25 years in 2019 with high rates in Azerbaijan (7·3 per 100 000 infants younger than 1 year) and Kyrgyzstan (5·7 per 100 000 children aged 1-4 years). Conversely, in other countries, drowning risk was greatest among the those older than 75 years, with high recorded drowning rates for people aged 75-79 years in Greece (19·4 per 100 000 people) and people aged 80-84 years in Cyprus (17·5 per 100 000 people). Although the causes of drowning are numerous and complex, prevention can be achieved through the combination of many simple and feasible actions. Challenges with data availability and robustness make it difficult to quantify the effect of a range of planetary drivers on drowning risk...
Language: en |