Yadira Salcedo was born in Mexico to parents who could not swim. As a child, he almost drowned when he waded too deep into a backyard pool.
Now a mother of two in Santa Ana, Calif., Ms. Salcedo “breaks the cycle,” she said, making sure Ezra, 3, and Ian, 1, never experience such fear. The family qualified for Red Cross scholarships in a new program that teaches children who may not otherwise have the opportunity to learn how to swim.
On a recent day, Ms. Salcedo and her children climbed into the Salgado Community Center pool together, using kickboards and blowing bubbles with an instructor, Josue, who used a mixture of English and Spanish.
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 rise this month, as they do every July, with children drowning just steps from their parents without a scream, struggle or splash. A 4-year-old in a Texas hotel pool, a 5-year-old in a California river, a 6-year-old in a Missouri lake and a 10-year-old in an Indiana public pool all drowned in the past week.
And yet, beyond 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 reducing the number of drowning deaths in the country appears to have increased, and the disparity in mortality among some racial groups has worsened.
“It’s hard to think of a more preventable cause of death. No one is going to say, ‘Oh, people just drown,'” said William Ramos, an associate professor at the 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 never learned to swim produces an 87 percent chance that a child won’t either, says Dr. Sadiqa AI Kendi, the head of the division of pediatric emergency medicine at Boston Medical Center, who studies the cyclical nature of damage and inequality.
“It’s anthropology,” Mr. Ramos said. “To start a new narrative around water is not an easy task.”
Recently published by the National Institutes of Health a call for research proposals to review drowning prevention, writing that “little is known” about what intervention strategies work. The CDC said it planned to do an in-depth review of childhood drownings in some states to better understand the contributing factors.
But epidemiologists point to a range of factors that could make it harder to close the gap, including shrinking recreation department budgets, a lack of national lifeguards and a period of distraction on pool decks, as parents engage in child supervision on laptops and cellphones when they work from home.
In the longer term, the numbers are likely to be exacerbated by climate change, said Deborah Girasek, a drowning researcher at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. More children are likely to drown in storm surge waters in Florida, fall through thin ice in Wisconsin, or climb into restricted reservoirs in Yosemite for respite from the soaring heat. (Research shows that drowning increases with each level on a thermometer.)
Even general drowning deaths have reduced by one third since 1990, they have increased by 16.8 percent in 2020 alone, according to the CDC There are still more than 4,000 of them in the United States annually, and about a quarter of the deaths are children. An CDC review shows that black children between the ages of 5 and 9 are 2.6 times more likely to drown in swimming pools than white children, and those between the ages of 10 and 14 are 3.6 times more likely to drown Disparities were also present across most age groups for Asian and Pacific Islander, Hispanic, and Native American and Alaska Native children.
Socioeconomic factors also play a role. A study of drownings in Harris County, Texas, for example, showed that they were nearly three times more likely for a child in a multifamily home than in a single-family residence, and that drownings in multifamily swimming pools – like the one in The apartment of Salcedos — is 28 times more likely than single-family pools.
said Ms. Salcedo said she often sees children swimming in the pool of her apartment complex unsupervised, ajar the gate with water bottles or shoes.
The leading theory to explain these inequalities goes back half a century to the proliferation of municipal pools after World War II. As those gave way to suburban swim clubs and middle-class backyard pools, historian Jeff Wiltse writes in his book on pool history, white children began learning to swim in private lessons, while children in minority families saw public pools fall into disrepair and aquatics budgets slashed. Many of the educational facilities and programs have yet to recover.
Black adults in particular reported having negative experiences around the water, with family anecdotes of being banned from public beaches during Jim Crow-era segregation and brutalized during the inclusion of public pools.
A UN resolution which was released in 2021 and a World Health Assembly decision this year to accelerate action urged each member country to prioritize the fight against childhood drowning. Both the WHO and the American Academy of Pediatrics implored the United States government to reach out.
“Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa — they all have a plan. Not us,” said Mr. Ramos. “The message to Congress is: We have to fix this, and we can. But look at seatbelts, fire safety, smoking cessation. Legislation will move the needle.”
Aquatics officials could add to gym class curricula or mandate fences around four-sided pools in backyards (because there are still many victims wade into the pools from the exposed side facing the house). said Ms. Girasek is eager to see legislation because “we see very clearly that it works.”
After former Secretary of State James Baker’s 7-year-old grandson Virginia Graeme Baker was trapped by sucking in a hot tub drain and drowned, a federal law was named in his honor requiring public pools and spa equipped with drain covers that meet certain standards. Everyone thinks to eradicate such deaths.
The US National Water Safety Action Plan, launched by a group of nonprofits last week, is the country’s first attempt to create a road map to address the crisis. Its 99 recommendations for the next decade serve as a guide through the country’s various gaps in research, funding, monitoring and parent education, compiled by passionate advocacy groups on budgets that don’t enough to fill them alone.
Connie Harvey, the director of Aquatics Centennial Campaign at the American Red Cross, held a Capitol Hill briefing recently with other experts, he said, “to let our leaders know that there is a plan — that this plan exists.”
Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida and a longtime advocate for drowning prevention, was the only member of Congress to attend.
Meanwhile, some local governments have adopted their own interventions. This summer, Seattle is launching a new initiative nonprofit based No Bottom, which connects hundreds of low-income and foster children with swimming lessons. Broward County, Fla., which has some of the highest drowning rates in the state, offers free vouchers. And Santa Ana plans to take more than $800,000 from the Cannabis Public Benefit Fund this year to bring its aquatics program back under its domain.
The city, with a population of nearly 80 percent Hispanic nestled between Orange County’s more affluent suburbs, has historically displayed racial and economic health disparities. One of its public pools is 63 years old. But its Parks and Recreation Department recently hired an aquatics supervisor and 36 new life guards — some of whom had to be taught to swim by the supervisor first.
Under the new Santa Ana program, Ms. Salcedo, a waitress, and her husband, a post office employee, who live in a three-generation household, got scholarships that reduced the cost of swimming lessons to $15 per child every two weeks. They plan to attend throughout the summer.
Ezra, who is 3 years old, cried on the first day of lessons. Now he’s sharing facts about hammers between strokes during the “Baby Shark” singalong. Ian, the 1-year-old, has yet to master walking on land. However, he paddled after an orange rubber duck, with his mother – now an excellent swimmer – keeping him afloat.
