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Journal Article

Citation

Ferretti E, De Angelis S, Donati G, Torre M. Microchem. J. 2014; 113: 64-68.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Metropolitan Microchemical Society (New York), Publisher Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.microc.2013.11.009

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Drowning is the process of experiencing respiratory impairment from submersion/immersion in liquid; outcomes are classified as death, morbidity and no morbidity. In most of the developed countries, drowning is the second or third cause of accidental death for children aged < 15 after road accident and fires and, according to the World Health Organization, the third leading cause of death in children aged 1-5 years. Males are especially at risk of drowning, with twice the overall mortality rate of females. Not all drownings are correlated to recreational water use, and the percentage that is attributable to swimming pools and similar environments is expected to vary from country to country. In order to analyze unintentional injury events occurring in swimming pools in Italy, Italian websites and newspaper were browsed for the period January 2008-December 2012. A search was performed using the web search engine Google and the keywords "drowning" and "risk of drowning". On the basis of the collected information, the recorded events were split up for geographical location of the sport facility, age and gender of the injured person, leading cause of the event and assistance received. Chi-square test was used to compare data by gender. The analyses were performed using the statistical software STATA 9.2. Data on 198 events were collected corresponding to an average of ca. 40 events/year. 67% of unintentional injury events were related to children aged 0-15 years. Our results confirms a higher incidence (87%) in summer, however this might be due not only to the higher number of people attending the swimming pools in that season, but also to the higher sensibility of the media in such period for this type of unintentional injury events. The same can be applied when the geographical area is considered: the higher number of events occurred in the North of Italy can be related both to a greater diffusion of swimming pools in these regions and to a higher sensibility of the media of these regions to the theme. In agreement with the international literature, males are more likely to drown than females. This is generally attributed to higher exposure to aquatic environment and riskier behavior such as swimming alone, drinking alcohol before swimming alone and boating. The "≤ 4" and "5-15" age classes showed the highest incidence of injuries. The mortality rate we found in these classes is in accordance with the data reported in the literature referring to swimming pool. Most of the incidents that didn't receive any kind of assistance (64%) occurred in domestic pools where the highest mortality rate (42%) was measured. For this kind of pools lifeguard assistance was never provided. Our investigation highlights the severity of the fatal and non-fatal unintentional drownings occurring in swimming pools in Italy. Most of unintentional drownings involve children aged < 15 and are a public health problem that might be prevented if correct strategies would be adopted by decision-makers. This is the first study performed in Italy that analyses data concerning fatal and non-fatal unintentional drownings occurred in swimming pools and stratifies them for place and month of occurrence, age and gender of the involved people as well as leading cause to the injury. The final scope of this study is to promote the research and public health initiatives to determine the burden and risk factors for unintentional drowning worldwide and to highlight the need of guidelines and regulations that improve the swimmers' safety. Keywords

Swimming pool;
Drowning;
Prevention;
Epidemiology;
Injury


Language: en

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