Drowning Is No. 1 Killer of Young Children

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Drowning is the leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 4, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Deaths are likely to arise this month, as they do every July, with children drowning just feet from their parents without a scream, struggle or splash. A 4-year-old at a Texas hotel pool, a 5-year-old in a California river, a 6-year-old at a Missouri lake and a 10-year-old at an Indiana public pool all drowned just this past week.

And yet, despite calls from the United Nations, the United States is one of the only developed countries without a federal plan to address the crisis. Thirty years of progress in decreasing the number of drowning deaths in the country appears to have plateaued, and disparities in deaths among some racial groups have worsened.

“It’s hard to imagine a more preventable cause of death. No one is going to say, ‘Oh, well, some people just drowned,’” said William Ramos, an associate professor at Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington and the director of the school’s Aquatics Institute.

“It’s time to go deeper than the sad statistics and answer the ‘why’ and the ‘how,'” he said.

A parent who has never learned to swim yields an 87 percent chance that a child won’t, either, said Dr. Sadiqa A.I. Kendi, the division chief of pediatric emergency medicine at Boston Medical Center, who studies the cyclical nature of injury and inequity.

“This is anthropology,” said Mr. Ramos. “To start a new narrative around water is not an easy task.”