India’s movie icon Sridevi’s death due to ‘accidental drowning’ in bath tub tri-ggered a flurry of activity in the media. Telugu electronic journalists took pains even to experiment with the bath tub to see how bath tub drowning is possible. But, reports say deaths due to bath tub drowning are common in US. Someone dies in a bath tub everyday in US. Here is the report from seattlepi.com. The Culprit is alcohol or drug consumption.
An American drowns nearly every day in a bathtub, hot tub or spa, and the deaths occur disproportionately in Western states, where victims often drink or take drugs while soaking in hot water.
Some rural areas like New Mexico and Wyoming report these unusual drownings at three times the national average, according to a Scripps Howard News Service study of federal mortality records from 1999 to 2003.
Residents of California, which leads the nation in residential ownership of hot tubs, are three times more likely to drown in a tub than are residents of the state of New York, where the rate of tub drownings and hot tub ownership are both low.
The study found 1,676 Americans were reported to have drowned in a tub during this five-year period, an average of 335 a year. Infants, very young children and the elderly are at risk, but more than half of all tub deaths are among able-bodied people between the ages of 5 and 64. Theculprit in many cases may be alcohol use in hot tubs, which are much more common in the West than in the Northeast.
“You get into a hot tub to relax and you drink to relax. When you put those two things together, you get more than you bargain for,” said Jonathan Howland, an epidemiologist at Boston University and a national expert on death by drowning. “The heat leads to dilation of the blood vessels, along with the alcohol. People are basically having a drop of blood pressure and having the equivalent of a faint,” Howland said.
Tony Gomez, manager of the Injury and Violence Prevention Division at the Seattle Public Health Department, said in some years as many as 70 percent of all adult drownings in tubs and pools investigated by his department involved consumption of alcohol.
“What we hear from those that survive or those that witnessed a drowning with alcohol impaired swimmers (and) soakers is that they just fell asleep or went unconscious and slipped under the water,” Gomez said.
The Scripps Howard study found the states with the highest rate of tub drownings are: New Mexico, Nevada, Wyoming, West Virginia, Colorado, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Florida. The states with the lowest number of tub deaths are New York, North Carolina, Delaware and North Dakota.
See full report here.