Dry Drowning

Hello, everyone.

This month I have declared that I will focus on having your car equiped for emergencies...a 72 hour kit for your car.
Today I am not going to write about 72 hour kits.

Today I will write about "Dry Drowning".

I often find very important articles that I just have to post-they may help save lives! This article from LA Times newspaper today was shocking to me. Dry drowning is when someone dies later...maybe an hour after an incident while swimming.
Please please read this article...

Dry drowning

Though water has always been a hazard to be wary of, the idea that someone could drown hours after visiting a swimming pool may seem new to many. On June 1, 10-year-old Johnny Jackson of Charleston, S.C., died while napping more than an hour after returning home from the pool with his mother. The incident has drawn new attention to the phenomenon of dry drowning, a danger long recognized by other names by emergency department physicians.

Medical examiners have found that as many as 15% of drowning fatalities are dry drowning victims -- those whose respiratory distress comes after an incident in the water. But it comes in different forms, and from different causes.

In one form, a muscle spasm of the larynx causes the victim to suffocate. Such spasms are most often associated with cold water forcefully hitting the epiglottis -- the flap at the base of the tongue that helps keep food and drink from entering the lungs. Hitting the water after a long, fast slide or from a high diving board appear to be the most common swimming-related causes of such a spasm, which can happen minutes or hours after the impact.

Jackson's dry drowning, however, appeared to have been caused by a delayed reaction to aspirating a large amount of water while swimming -- the other main form of dry drowning. In cases where a near-drowning has occurred during swimming, the lungs can be damaged, allowing them to fill with fluid. Because this can take time, the victim may become progressively more oxygen-deprived over time, causing him to have breathing difficulties, become sluggish or tired and to behave oddly.

The appropriate responses to signs of trouble -- sputtering, choking, bluish tinge -- may differ depending on what has caused the interrupted flow of oxygen to the body. A laryngeal spasm may resolve itself when the victim is removed from the water and his muscles relax somewhat. If not, a few quick rescue breaths are in order to get the flow of air past the blockage.

But experts warn that if a person has aspirated a large amount of water, it is unwise to consider the emergency over. If the incident was minor, a victim should be monitored closely and brought to an emergency department promptly if he becomes extremely sleepy, behaves unusually or appears to have continuing difficulty breathing. Any of those things could be a sign that the victim is not getting enough oxygen to the brain, possibly because his lungs -- damaged from the aspiration of water -- are filling with fluid.

In such cases, called "post-immersion syndrome," the reduced airflow can cause organs to begin to fail in the hours or days after a near-drowning.

"If somebody has been involved in a drowning situation or a near-drowning situation, they should be evaluated by a physician," says Dr. William H. Shoff, an emergency department physician and associate professor of emergency medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. "All kinds of things can happen. . . . They may feel OK, but as a clinician, I've certainly seen people who said they were fine and they were not. They decompensated, right in front me."

Add to that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's latest warning of other dangers of recreational swimming -- including cryptosporidium, a virus impervious to the effects of chlorine that can cause stomach upset, diarrhea and worse.

To read about recent cases, go to www.cdc.gov/healthy swimming/cryptofacts.htm.



melissa.healy@latimes.com

For more on summer hazards, go to latimes.com/danger.
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-danger16-2008jun16,0,5644216.story