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Dry Drowning
The Myths and Facts of Delayed Drownings
By Kelly Burgess
It was a tragic story that struck fear into the hearts of parents everywhere. More than an hour after leaving a community swimming pool, a 10-year-old boy from South Carolina died at his home. He had drowned, but how? While he was at the pool, he had an incident where he'd swallowed so much water he'd become quite sick, but he'd seemed to recover.
At some point, media attention began to focus on a little known phenomenon called dry drowning. Dry drowning is estimated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to be the cause of 10 to 15 percent of all drowning deaths. Soon, there was so much misinformation about so-called "dry drowning" that Internet forums began buzzing with parents worried their child could drown after a bath or from a drink of water. While dry drowning is a real condition, this is not what the boy died from and it's not likely to be caused by any casual, everyday contact with water. However, parents can take a lesson from what really did happen to prevent death or serious injury to their own children.
As head of pediatric emergency medicine at MCGHealth in Augusta, Ga., Dr. James Wilde works hard to ease parents' fears. He worries that parents will not understand exactly what happened in the case of the boy from South Carolina and may overreact and be afraid to allow their children to swim.
"News reports made it sound as if the boy drowned in his sleep, but based upon what I read he actually experienced a near drowning incident earlier in the day," Dr. Wilde says. "He was still experiencing symptoms of drowning when he got home, and he died when those symptoms went untreated."
Technically, what the boy experienced was not a dry drowning at all. It was a near-drowning that turned into a complete drowning, also known as a delayed drowning. Dr. Wilde says that worsening respiratory distress is a concern in any case of near-drowning, and it's why anyone who has a near-drowning incident should be closely monitored for at least 24 hours afterward.