HEALTH AND WELLBEING
1.5L The amount of swallowed water to cause drowning
3RD
Drowning is the third leading cause of unintentional injury death worldwide
90s Worldwide , 1,000 people die in water everyday ; that ' s 1 person every 90 seconds .
Myth busting As many people , especially if they are not practised swimmers , doubt their ‘ floatability ’, in 2018 Professor Tipton and his team conducted a trial with 85 people of different ages , shapes , sizes , genders and swimming abilities . This showed that the vast majority float quite naturally on their back (“ even if they think they can ’ t ”), aided , if necessary , by some gentle hand sculling .
Another myth debunked was the notion that clothing drags you down : “ Quite the contrary ,” says Professor Tipton . “ Clothing can restrict you if you ’ re trying to swim and it ’ s one of the reasons for not swimming if you ’ ve gone overboard . But if you stay still in clothing , it traps air and helps you stay above the surface .”
However , while humans have natural buoyancy with air in their lungs , there is still a right and wrong way to float . The wrong way is to be upright , which puts increasing strain on the heart and forces air out of any clothing .
“ Floating on your back is much less stressful … you ’ ll still be immersed but your airways will be clear of the water . And the calmer you become , the easier it gets .” This message is now being taught in schools in programmes that also teach about rips and tides .
Cause of the cause Community education aside , a fundamental part of Professor Tipton ’ s research is to investigate ‘ the cause of the cause ’ of death , because this also informs safety and sea rescue messages . “ It is not enough to say someone has drowned . We need to know the cause of the physiological responses that led to that drowning .
“ This not only helps you understand what happened , but also shows where you can mitigate and step in to break the chain that leads from the cause of the cause of death , to death .”
One place where this chain can be broken is teaching – or in the case of people who work on the sea , training – how to reduce the panic and subsequent physiological responses to cold water shock .
Not understanding the cause of the cause
Drowning is the biggest killer of sportspeople undertaking their sport
The RNLI Respect the Water Campaign , underpinned by our work , was seen by 46 million people in the UK in 2019
Floating on your back is much less stressful … you ’ ll still be immersed but your airways will be clear of the water . And the calmer you become , the easier it gets . – Mike Tipton of death on immersion has led to fatally flawed assumptions such as the effect , or relevance , of hypothermia .
Professor Tipton says the idea that people die of hypothermia in minutes originates from the sinking of the Titanic , but hypothermia takes at least 30 minutes to incapacitate a human adult , even in ice-cold water .
Most cold-water fatalities occur within minutes of immersion , which means there are other factors – in particular cold shock – that lead to panic breathing and the inhalation of a fatal volume of water .
Professor Tipton points to the 1992 crash of a Super Puma helicopter servicing a North Sea oil rig and the deaths of 11 of the 17 people aboard . Professor Tipton investigated the accident after becoming concerned about the lack of detail released about how or why people had drowned trying to escape from the ditched , inverted craft . He noted that all of the safety procedures and the immersion suits being worn were based on protecting people from hypothermia without any consideration of the cause of the cause – cold shock . “ The breath-hold time required to get out of a ditched , submerged helicopter cabin is 50 seconds . Physiological studies show that cold water shock gives a person a breath-hold time of only five seconds , but this had not even been considered because the focus was on preventing one cause of immersion death , hypothermia , and not the cause of the cause , which was the real reason people drowned .”
Fast-forward to the present day and this is why Professor Tipton ’ s research , put into practice by RNLI , SLSGB and others in the UK and abroad , is saving lives . People are become better educated about what causes death on immersion and how to lessen this risk .
In 2017 , coastal drownings in the UK fell by 30 per cent and this was attributed to the Float to Live campaign . Fittingly , in 2018 , Professor Mike Tipton became Professor Mike Tipton MBE , awarded the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for public service for science that saves lives , from lab to lifesaving .
ISSUE 02 / 2021
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