{"id":2054,"date":"2020-10-02T16:44:03","date_gmt":"2020-10-02T15:44:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/injury-prevention\/?p=2054"},"modified":"2020-10-08T10:05:12","modified_gmt":"2020-10-08T09:05:12","slug":"youll-be-surprised-to-know-what-we-still-dont-know-about-drowning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/injury-prevention\/2020\/10\/02\/youll-be-surprised-to-know-what-we-still-dont-know-about-drowning\/","title":{"rendered":"You\u2019ll be surprised to know what we still don\u2019t know about drowning."},"content":{"rendered":"

Authors<\/em><\/strong>:
\nErin Hamilton, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
\nAmy Peden, Royal Life Saving Society, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia and School of Public Health and Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
\nRichard Franklin, College of Public Health, Medical and Veterinary Science, James Cook University, Douglas, Queensland, Australia and Royal Life Saving Society, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia<\/p>\n

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When we talk about global health, we hear about major causes of death and why people are dying, but how many people really die in each country? How much do causes of death vary across time, by age, or sex?\u00a0 Are we hearing more about some conditions over others? Why? Why is it even important to know?<\/p>\n

Globally, injury is a leading cause of preventable death. Understanding how people are dying from injury helps policy makers reduce communities\u2019 risk of injury more\u00a0effectively while providing researchers with the tools to explore and prevent these premature deaths. Since 2010, BMJ Injury Prevention has published\u00a0multiple series of papers from the Institute for Health Metric\u2019s Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study<\/a> that highlight the global impact of death and disability from injuries.\u00a0 Estimates for 2017<\/a> indicate that almost 4.5 million people died due to\u00a0injury, while 520 million new cases of non-fatal injury occurred that year.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Image from unsplash.com (Mohamed Nashah)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Drowning<\/strong> is a top ranking injury (5th<\/sup>) that causes death globally, but there is still a lot we don\u2019t know. This is, in part, due to the fact that the data we have on drowning is suboptimal. What we do know about drowning is children are most at risk, and the vast majority of drowning deaths occur in low and middle-income countrie<\/a>s (LMIC)<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span>Paradoxically, this is where accuracy of drowning data is poorest, due to the speed at which drowning death occurs and challenges associated\u00a0with counting deaths.<\/span><\/p>\n

In early 2020, the first GBD drowning paper was published in Injury Prevention<\/a>. The study estimated 295,000 people around the world lost their lives to unintentional drowning in 2017, a 45% reduction since 1990. Despite the challenge of not having data from each country and population, the GBD study leverages the data we do have globally and uses statistical modeling tools to provide a comprehensive set of disease, injury, and risk factor estimates for 195 countries and territories.<\/p>\n

When we look at the trends of death from unintentional drowning, there are patterns we\u2019re able to explain and others where very little is still understood.<\/p>\n

What we know:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n