Young Children Are Most at Risk of Drowning

July 25 marks World Drowning Prevention Day, a global awareness day led by the World Health Organization. In the organization’s latest status report on drowning prevention, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called drowning an often neglected, yet highly preventable public health challenge. “Anyone can drown. No one should,” he concluded his call for better prevention around the world. Yet despite being largely preventable, drowning continues to claim roughly 300,000 lives each year.

In the United States, unintentional drowning causes roughly 4,400 deaths annually, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As our chart shows, the risk is not evenly distributed across age groups. Young children are particularly vulnerable, with the drowning rate among 0 to 4-year-olds roughly twice as high as it is for the general population. In fact, drowning is the leading cause of death among children aged 1 to 4, while adolescents and adults face heightened risks during the summer months.

Interestingly, the lowest drowning rate among all age groups can be observed for children aged 5 to 14, which may seem counterintuitive at first. These children benefit from a combination of factors that makes them less vulnerable to drowning accidents: many children of this age group have already learned basic swimming skills, they are significantly less likely to fall into water, have better risk awareness than toddlers and yet, they are still largely supervised in and around the water. Additionally, they are less likely to participate in high-risk activities like boating and they rarely consume alcohol, which is a major driver of drowning incidents in older teens and adults.

These patterns underline why experts consider drowning accidents largely preventable: drowning is mostly driven by predictable risk factors: age, exposure to water and supervision. Public health experts emphasize that a combination of measures, including swimming skills, barriers such as pool fencing and increased supervision, could prevent a large share of drowning deaths, especially among young children.