No need to fret about death by dry drowning
It’s impossible for a dip in water to cause drowning hours later
As kids cannonball into summer pools and swim in lakes, parents keep a watchful eye to make sure they’re safe.
But physicians and water safety experts say one worry — so-called “dry” or “secondary drowning” — may be on the minds of parents when it shouldn’t be, and shifts focus from real concerns.
“Everyone needs to calm down,” said Dr. Peter Wernicki, member of the American Red Cross Scientific Advisory Council. “This whole thing has totally been over-hyped by social media and people who are not knowledgeable on the subject.”
With summer swim season beginning, tales appear on Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, typically involving a child who was rescued from the water, or gulped down a mouthful, and then stops breathing hours — or even days — later.
But the misconception is that these children showed no symptoms between the time they left the water and when their parents noticed breathing distress, Wernicki said. It leads parents to worry that even if their child seems OK and is breathing normally, they could still be in danger.
“That just doesn’t happen,” he said. “A child doesn’t (act fine) for eight hours and then die (from drowning).”
In some of these incidents, the child contracted aspiration pneumonia — an infection that develops from water trapped in the lungs. But that
isn’t drowning, Wernicki said. It’s a rare condition, he added, and a child with it would show symptoms, including coughing and labored breathing many hours after leaving the water, and parents would know something was wrong.
“Either you drown or you don’t,” said Dr. Charles Nozicka, pediatric emergency medicine physician at Advocate Children’s Hospital in Park Ridge.
In the rare cases when a patient develops aspiration pneumonia, they are “still coughing, still breathing fast” in the hours after a water rescue, Nozicka said.
Typically, the body takes care of water in the airway by coughing it out, he said. Then, the symptoms subside.
“If you’re in the water, regardless of how short you think it was, if there are any lingering symptoms, you need to seek medical attention,” he said.
But what doctors are seeing is parents bringing in children who show no symptoms, said Dr. Melissa Millewich, an emergency room physician at Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove.
They often refer to children they’ve read about on social media, Millewich said. She informs them there’s been no documented case of an asymptomatic child dying from drowning days after leaving the pool.