A new study has found that one in three children are at risk of drowning after being left alone in the bath by their parents for any amount of time.
Parents have been told time and time again, never to leave their offspring alone in bathtubs, paddling pools or any other open standing water, even for a moment. But an American study conducted by researchers from the Emory University and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta has found that many parents are not heeding this warning.
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The study findings were published in the March/April issue of the journal Ambulatory Paediatrics.
Study head, Dr Harold Simon believes that awareness needs to be raised in order to eradicate this unnecessary, tragic problem.
Tragic statistics
According to the National Centre for Injury Prevention and Control, half of the 1 345 drowning incidents in 1999 among Americans under the age of twenty, were children five years old and under. Thirty two percent of these drownings were toddlers and infants under the age of two.
Most of these, in fact 60% of the unintentional drownings among infants under the age of one, happened in the bath.
Simon's team followed 259 families to observe the levels of supervision that the parents gave to their bathing children.
A few deadly minutes
One third of the parents had or did leave their child alone in the bath, for up to five minutes or more.
The drowning risk of children aged two and under is very great. Twenty-one children in this age group were left unsupervised at some time. Five of these toddlers were left alone for over two minutes, as were four infants under the age of one.
Some of the more severe cases included that of a five-month-old child that was left alone for over two minutes, when the caregiver went to fetch a towel.
One caregiver left an eight-month-old child alone in the bath for five minutes while they cooked in the kitchen.
Telephone conversations, fetching diapers and checking on their other children were other common reasons listed by researchers as to why parents left their offspring unattended.
Not the older sibling's job
Simon's team found that it was mainly adults who supervised children in the bath, but in some families, supervision was the job of older siblings. Five of these families had a child under the age of 10 to look after their younger sibling in the tub. In one case, a five-year-old was in charge of looking after a 22-month-old.
Approximately eight percent of parents observed revealed that their children bathed alone before they were five years old.
Top-heavy toddlers
Although the study focused on the bath, children can also drown in buckets and even toilets.
When children are very young, their heads are usually too big for their bodies. This makes them top-heavy and very susceptible to falling into a pool or drowning in a bath. "If they tip into (a bucket or other object), it's a situation where they just can't tip out of it," explains the study author. It has been said that kids can drown in as little as one cup of water.
"It was only for a minute," is not good enough. Even a very short period of time can be tragic. – (Health24)
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