When a backpacker drowns or a child's life is cut short in a swimming pool tragedy, it makes headlines – but a 10-year study reveals the deadliest and most common location for drowning is Australia's vast and often remote rivers.
Middle-aged men, many of whom are at least four times over the alcohol limit, continue to be over-represented among victims, said the study's lead author, Amy Peden of the Royal Life Saving Society of Australia.
![Bailey Maher, 18, of Camden, drowned in December 2015 when he went for a swim from a houseboat at a Christmas party on ...](/web/20161005005900im_/http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/l/m/6/2/n/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grq4z9.png/1475383657867.jpg)
Of the 2892 people who drowned in Australia between 2002 and 2012, 770 jumped, dived or fell to their deaths in rivers, making it the leading location for unintentional drowning deaths.
Four out of every five victims were male, nearly all drowning victims lived with 100 kilometres of where they died, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and people living in remote locations were more likely to drown.
The percentage of drownings in rivers has remained relatively unchanged for the past 20 years except for a small drop in the most recent year. Rivers accounted for 300 more deaths on average than the next bigger locations, including swimming pools and beaches, according to Ms Peden who reviewed reports by coroners.
About 372,000 people drown worldwide every year, with around 90 per cent of these deaths occurring in low and middle-income countries, the World Health Organisation says.
The WHO's expert on drownings David Meddings told reporters attending Safety 2016, the leading injury prevention conference in Finland, that drowning – relative to its global impact – was a vastly neglected public health issue.
More than half of all drowning deaths are people under 25, males are twice as likely to drown as women and drowning kills more people worldwide than meningitis. In Bangladesh, drowning kills more than 43 per cent of children aged one to four. Diarrhoea, once a major cause of death, now causes only 2 per cent of deaths of children aged under five.
Internationally the real drowning toll may be much higher because many deaths in rivers may be attributed to other causes, such as natural disasters and transportation incidents, Ms Peden said.
As well, only one in four to five drownings deaths are reported in many parts of the world.
WHO's global report on drowning estimated that the death toll from drowning in Australia, Finland and the US is about 39-50 per cent higher than reported because many deaths are recorded under other causes, such as water transport.
The Australian research, supported by the Royal Life Saving Society and James Cook University, is believed to be the first countrywide study of drowning deaths in rivers anywhere in the world.
Ms Peden said it was frustrating to see the same sort of victims drown again and again in preventable tragedies: They were "middle-aged males who had drunk an inordinate amount of alcohol. It's a typical picture you see time and time again.
"A large proportion of my victims in the study were four times above the legal limit," she said. About 25 per cent of all victims were above the legal limit for alcohol, and where alcohol was involved, 85 per cent were male.
While deaths from drownings have decreased in swimming pools because of the introduction of fencing laws, public awareness campaigns and education, drownings in rivers stayed steady over the decade studied.
This year drowning in rivers dropped below oceans for the first time in 20 years, said Ms Peden, who is the Royal Life Saving Society's national manager, research and policy. But she warned that it was too soon to tell whether the decline was caused by a seasonal variation or by river awareness campaigns.
She said more research needed to be done to prevent river drownings. While there had been lots of well-funded research on the prevention of drownings in swimming pools and beaches, very little had been done specifically on rivers.
A major problem for policy makers is that many of these drownings occur in remote locations.
The most dangerous 10 rivers are the Murray, followed by the Brisbane, the Yarra, the Swan, the Hawkesbury, the Murrumbidgee, Sandy Creek in Queensland, the Derwent in Tasmania, Katherine in NT and the Macquarie in NSW.
In the 10 years studied by Ms Peden, 15 people died in the Hawkesbury. Since then, deaths have continued. In December last year 18-year-old roof tiler Bailey Maher from Camden, died in the Hawkesbury when he went swimming from a houseboat where he had been enjoying a Christmas party with friends and family.
Ms Peden's research found males accounted for 100 per cent of river drowning deaths as a result of fishing and 93 per cent of river drowning deaths as a result of a rescue attempt and 92 cent of drowning deaths as a result of jumping into the water and using watercraft.
Julie Power attended Safety 2016 with support from the ICFJ-WHO Safety 2016 Reporting Fellowship Program and Bloomberg Philanthropies.