Drowning is the second most common cause of accidental death among young children in Ontario, after motor vehicle accidents, a new reports shows.

Children under five are at greatest risk of drownings, and toddlers faced almost half of near-drowning injuries, data released Wednesday by the Canadian Institute for Health Information suggests.

Canadian Red Cross estimates an average of 500 drowning deaths in Canada per year. (AP file photo)
Canadian Red Cross estimates an average of 500 drowning deaths in Canada per year. (AP file photo)

For every child who drowned in 2002/2003, there were six to 10 more who almost drowned and had to go to hospital, said Margaret Keresteci, one of the report's authors and a manager of clinical registries at the institute.

Children under five can drown after tripping into a few centimetres of water. "A young child that age doesn't have the same fear or doesn't understand the danger of water," said Keresteci.

Keresteci and her co-authors found 1,166 people visited an emergency department in Ontario in 2002-2003 for water-related problems. One in four of the children who experienced a near-drowning suffered permanent brain damage.

Barbara Underhill
Barbara Underhill

Most incidents did not involve swimming. Of children involved in a drowning incident, 76 per cent were near water, such as playing on swimming pool decks or in sand on a beach, the report's authors found.

The statistics don't surprise Barbara Underhill of Mississauga, Ont. Underhill lost her eight-month-old daughter after she slipped through a screen door and drowned in a pool 12 years ago.

"I'm more shocked that the numbers are so high and nothing's been done to this point," said Underhill, who started a project to encourage swim instruction. "It's taken this amount, these numbers to really wake people up to this problem."

Together, hypoxia (lack of oxygen) and internal injuries such as damage to the lungs were the most commonly recorded injuries for near-drownings, 83 per cent. Most such injuries were sustained during the summer.

Of the water-related visits to emergency wards, 68 per cent were drownings or near-drownings, with the remainder involving injuries such as slipping on a deck of a watercraft.

Earlier this week, Carolyn Bennett, the federal minister responsible for public health, called for swimming lessons to be included in the school curriculum, with the help of some federal funding.

The Lifesaving Society, an organization that certifies all lifeguards and analyses drowning deaths to promote safety, has also called for all children to get swimming lessons in school, as is the case in Australia.