Muscat: More than half of the drowning incidents in Oman involve children under the age of six, a report published in the Oman Medical Journal has said.

The report, published by four researchers at Sultan Qaboos University, studied the circumstances and consequences of drowning involving children in Oman, by studying patients aged 18 and under who were admitted to Sultan Qaboos University Hospital’s emergency department over a span of 10 years from January 2008 to December 2017, for complications related to drowning.

The study was conducted by Niranjal Lal Jeswani, Abdullah Al Reesi and Muhammad Faisal Khilji from the Department of Emergency Medicine at Sultan Qaboos University Hospital and Syed Rizvi from the Faculty of Family Medicine and Public Health at the College of Medicine and Health Sciences at Sultan Qaboos University.

Preventive measures
Their research read: “A total of 74 patients were included in the study; 54 were male and 47 were aged less than six years. More than half (59.4 percent) of the drowning incidents happened in swimming pools, 21 children were unsupervised during the incident and 39 required cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Out of all studied subjects, three were brain dead and two developed severe neurological injury.

“Our study suggests that children, especially males under the age of six with no swimming ability, need strict supervision next to bodies of water,” the study added. “Furthermore, preventive measures might include raising community awareness about the risk factors of drowning, commencing public CPR lessons and strict pool safety regulation by related authorities.”
Irina Samakar, a swim coach at the Nautilus Swimming Club in Oman, said that while it is important for children to learn swimming, it is doubly vital that parents also learn to do so.

“Oftentimes, I see that some of the adults who accompany their children to pools do not have any swimming abilities of their own,” she said. “Adults feel ashamed on admitting they don’t know how to swim. However, this is an extremely important skill that is needed when you are put in a position where you need to save your child’s life.

“Let us not forget the unfortunate news we sometimes read of children and adults drowning in wadis because they did not know how to swim, and because there wasn’t anyone around to immediately save them,” she added.

The SQU study included 32 infants aged 12 months and under, 30 toddlers aged between one and three years, 15 preschoolers between the ages of four and six, 17 children of a school-going age from seven to 14 and 10 adolescents between the ages of 15 and 18.

Vulnerable groups
The study also found that there is a high likelihood of drowning among people in three age groups: Children aged five and under, adolescents, and the elderly. The usual places of drowning for children are swimming pools, bathtubs, buckets and natural bodies of water. Epilepsy, medical illness and use of alcohol or illicit drugs are risk factors for drowning among children and adolescents.

Reasons for drowning incidents
Lack of parents’ education, infants left unsupervised and children under five (especially males) are factors that enhanced significantly the risk of drowning. Given Oman’s vast coastline that covers most of the southeastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, the researchers discovered that incidents of drowning in the country are quite common, especially in wadis and involving those who do not know how to swim.

A vast majority of drowning incidents (68 out of 74) occurred at night. Summer, when temperatures are hot and people take to swimming to cool off, was also the season when the largest proportion of drowning incidents occurred: Twenty-nine drownings occurred in the summer months, significantly more than during the autumn (18 incidents), winter (nine) and spring (18).

Risky places
Public swimming pools were the places where the single largest number of drownings took place, accounting for 38 incidents, or more than half of the cases studied. Seventeen people were admitted to SQUH after drowning at sea. Tellingly, lack of adult supervision of children who were swimming contributed to the drowning of 53 people.

Thirty-six of the people admitted to hospital for issues related to drowning were under the appropriate swimming age, while 11 did not know how to swim. Sixty-five were those who required medical assistance after being submerged under water for less than 10 minutes.