Swimmer's Daily

  • How did a 13-year-old boy end up in a medically-induced coma after an incident at a pool inside a Buffalo school when school officials say the teen was walking and talking?

    A woman who was at the pool Tuesday at Waterfront School #95 shared this video with 7 Eyewitness News. It shows a very chaotic scene.

    Students from School #81 were at the pool that day testing out their boats made of recycled materials. In the video, you can see a boy going across the pool on one of those boats using a kayak paddle as other kids line the edges and play in the water.

    If you watch carefully, you can see 13-year-old Larryn Watkins come up for air near the kayak before becoming unresponsive. A short time passes before officials start shouting for kids to clear the pool and the teen is pulled out of the water.

    In another clip shared with 7 Eyewitness News, school officials work to resuscitate Larryn. You can see the teen moving his hand after his eyes open.

    See WKBW

    Full video

  • A warning from parents from East Tennessee Children’s Hospital in this week’s Nurses Know segment.

    We are learning more about germs floating around in lake, river or pool that could make you very sick.

    The Centers for Disease Control is warning swimmers about the risk of contracting Norovirus from the water. It’s the same bug blamed for sickening hundreds on cruise ships, causing severe stomach and intestinal illness.

    Darci Hodge, Registered Nurse and Infection Control Director at ETCH said the virus can be spread in water when water contaminated with germs is swallowed. That is why kids are greatest at risk for contracting this illness.

    Here’s a list of symptoms to watch for:

    • Diarrhea and vomiting
    • Severe stomach cramping
    • Fever
    • Headache
    • Body Aches

    “Prevention is very important,” said Hodge, who had the following tips for parents.

    • Don’t swim if you’ve had symptoms of diarrhea or vomiting.

    Read Local 8

    Photo by mark_irvine

  • In a recently launched “drought education” campaign, trade group the California Pool and Spa Association (CPSA) suggests that installing a backyard swimming hole is an effective — and super-fun! — way to conserve water as the state’s historic dry spell enters its fourth year.

    In fact, the Let’s Pool Together campaign claims that mindfully maintained residential swimming pools require far less water than lush, irrigated lawns. Citing “independent studies,” the campaign trumpets the fact that swimming pools, of which there are an estimated 1.8 million private ones in California, use roughly half the amount of water that a lawn uses in the same period.

    And as for that massive first fill, the campaign claims that the average amount of water needed to fill a new pool in its first year, 26,250 gallons, is still less — about 3,750 gallons less — than the amount of precious H2O needed to maintain a 800-square-foot lawn’s desired shade of non-brown. The savings can grow even greater in subsequent years after the pool is first installed and filled.

    Many water experts believe that regularly irrigated traditional lawns and residential pools use around the same amount of water, although there is indeed the potential for a pool to consume less depending on numerous different factors including size, age and maintenance.

    CPSA Chairman Mike Geremia lays it all out in a news release:

    Many people assume pools and spas waste water, but that’s just not true. Because pools and spas often replace traditional lawns, which are very water-intensive, every pool and spa actually saves thousands of gallons of water per year. Yet even with those water savings, we know there are steps pool and spa owners can take this summer to potentially save even more. That’s why we’re launching the Let’s Pool Together campaign — to ensure that pool and spa owners do their part during the drought.

    Read more here on mmn.com

    Photo by oatsy40

  • Robin Dale Oen believes that the life of his brother Alexander could have saved, and criticises the support team for failing to notice his heart disease, instead believing that his symptoms were because of a pinched nerve.

    – “If we weren’t athletes, if we were like the man in the street, then Alexander would definitely be alive today. A general practitioner would have discovered the heart disease very early,” says Dale Oen.

    Alexander Dale Oen’s died at the height of his sport career. He died suddenly and without warning while on altitude camp with the Norwegian national swim team in April 2012.

    Alexander knew that heart disease ran in the family, but didn’t suffer any symptoms that something was seriously wrong until during the winter three years ago.

    – “He had a heart attack about three or four months before he died, but it wasn’t discovered until after he died,” says Dale Oen.

    Sad about what happened

    Roald Bahr, chief physician at the Norwegian élite sports center Olympiatoppen wishes that they had managed to discover the illness.

    – “We respect the family’s message, and their sorrow. We share their grief. Both Olympiatoppen and our attending physician gave their unreserved apology to the family when the autopsy report was presented. And we still stand behind this apology. Alexander Dale Oen’s heart disease could have been discovered, but neither we nor our experts managed to do this. This we regret.”

    Common gene defect

    First after the autopsy, came the diagnosis. The disease got a name: Familial hypercholesterolemia. This is a hereditary genetic disorder, and it is possible that as many as half a percent of all Norwegians have it, says Ottar Nygård, professor of cardiology at the University of Bergen.

    – The disease is easily discovered as you only need to take a normal blood sample and send it to the state hospital. They the do a gene test, and you get an answer within a week.

    How dangerous is the disease if you get medicine for it?

    – If you take medicine, then some believe that the risk for getting a heart attack is on par with that for those who don’t have the gene defect, says NygÃ¥rd.

    Not bitter

    The older brother says he is not bitter that the gene defect was not discovered, despite sympon and family history. But he hopes that people can learn from Alexander Dale Oen’s death.

    Shouldn’t you yourself have thought about the possibility that you could be sick?

    – “We knew that there was sickness in the family, but we thought that we couldn’t be struck by it. We were élite athletes after all, and our focus was on becoming the best in the world.”

    Read and watch NRK (in Norwegian)

  • Swimming survival programs can prevent drowning just as well as immunization protects against disease, says the World Health Organization in its first report on the issue.

    The comparison by the prestigious global health agency is a huge shot in the arm for Ontario’s Swim to Survive program, celebrating its 10th anniversary Thursday, says the Lifesaving Society.

    “The WHO’s report and its identification of swimming survival programs as an important drowning prevention tool is big news for us,” said Barb Byers of the Lifesaving Society. “Basically, it gives us the credentials to expand the program to other provinces.”

    See The Star

  • Hosting the 2017 FINA World Aquatics Championships could cost Hungary 49 billion forints (EUR 157m), though the budget would recover about 10 billion forints in the form of VAT, the government’s commissioner for priority investments in the capital has said.

    Balázs Fürjes said the construction of an aquatics centre in the north of the capital that will serve as the event’s main venue would cost net 21.4 billion forints. Planning is expected to cost net 1.5 billion forints, while net 14 billion forints is budgeted for the construction and dismantling of temporary structures and flood protection infrastructure, and net 1.8 billion forints has been set aside as a reserve. Including VAT, the items add up to about 49 billion forints, he said. The 2016 budget bill allocates 27.3 billion forints for developments necessary to host the FINA World Aquatics Championships.

    FINA announced in March that it granted the right to host the event to Budapest, and an agreement was signed in April. The event was originally planned to be held in Guadalajara in Mexico but the city pulled out in February for financial reasons. Five billion TV viewers are expected to tune into the event worldwide, which has been branded the largest-ever sports event ever to take place in Hungary.

    Despite its high costs, the event is expected to pay an invaluable contribution to boosting the country’s image abroad.

    Read Hungary Today

  • A teenager in Italy recently beat some incredible odds when he survived for 42 minutes underwater, according to news reports.

    The 14-year-old boy, identified only as “Michael” by the Italian newspaper Milan Chronicle, reportedly dove off a bridge into a canal with some friends last month and never resurfaced. His foot became caught on something underwater and it took firefighters and other first responders nearly an hour to free him from the depths. Though Michael remained on life support for an entire month, he recently woke up and seems to be doing fine, Time reported.

    While Michael’s story is certainly unusual, it’s not unheard of for people to survive prolonged stints underwater, according to Dr. Zianka Fallil, a neurologist at North Shore-LIJ’s Cushing Neuroscience Institute in New York. Fallil, who called the teenager’s recovery “quite remarkable,” told Live Science that there are two physiological processes that may come into play when a person is submerged underwater for an extended period of time with no oxygen.

    The first of these processes is known as the “diving reflex,” or bradycardic response, a physiological response that has been observed most strongly in aquatic mammals, but which is also believed to take place in humans. (This is the same reflex that results in newborn babies holding their breath and opening their eyes when submerged in water). When a person’s face is submerged in water, blood vessels constrict and the heart slows down considerably, Fallil explained. Blood is then diverted to parts of the body that need it most.

    “The body protects the most efficient organs — the brain, the heart, the kidneys — and pulls the blood away from the extremities and other, not-as-essential, organs,” Fallil said.

    The diving reflex is often cited as the thing that saves people from nearly drowning. However, it’s difficult to study this reflex in humans (likely because of the obvious dangers of recreating near-drowning experiences in a lab), said Fallil, who pointed to another, less controversial explanation for how people survive long stretches underwater — the selective brain cooling hypothesis.

    “The selective brain cooling hypothesis [states] that, the quicker the brain cools, the more likely it is to survive,” she said.

    When you’re immersed in cold water for a prolonged period of time, your body may carry out several processes that allow cooled blood to enter the brain, according to Fallil. One of these processes, hypercapnic vasodilation, occurs when the body retains carbon dioxide as a result of not breathing. This extra carbon dioxide causes blood vessels in your brain to dilate (become wider), which in turn allows more cool blood to enter the brain.

    Read more here on livescience

    Photo by felizfeliz

  • There has been a recent push of articles regarding banning breath holding in pools lately as well as a segment on Good Morning America. This media coverage and efforts by certain interest groups has resulted in the ban of breath holding activities in New York City and Santa Barbara, California.

    I do not deny that are fatalities happening in pools from people holding their breath. I can easily understand the reaction of many groups who want to ban breath holding in pools. I certainly disagree that banning these activities will lead to reducing fatalities.

    In fact I believe it will increase these fatalities… Allow me to explain.

    • Swimming has risks, people die in swimming pools all across the United States every year. The aquatics industry does not ban swimming. It understands education is the key and promotes swimming instruction. These courses happen by certified swimming instructors.
    • Scuba diving has risks. To deal with those risks people must take scuba classes in order to learn how to scuba dive safely. Most of these scuba classes happen at public pools. Scuba instructors have insurance and pools are placed as additional insured on the insurance policies.
    • Freediving and breath holding have risks, and people learn how to do so safety by taking freediving courses through licensed and insured instructors just like in scuba and swimming. Freediving instructors have insurance and the pools are listed as additional insured just like scuba. These courses happen in public pools just like scuba.

     

    As an advocate for freediving safety I am running into more and more problems by pools saying no breath holding activities and placing arbitrary bans on breath-holding – which blocks me from teaching people how to do this sport safely.

    Read more here on deeperblue.com

  • A Wickham teenager who survived a “scary” 16-hour ordeal after becoming stranded while free-diving off the Pilbara coast swam for up to seven hours and thought he was going to die before he finally reached land.

    Mr Saylor, who had been free-diving with three friends on Monday, was found about 6.40am on a beach on the south side of Delambre Island, by West Pilbara Marine Rescue.

    After being released from Karratha’s Nickol Bay Hospital on Tuesday morning, Steven Saylor described how he swam for hours in rough conditions before he hit the shore at Delambre Island, off the coast of Wickham.

    “Everything (was going through my head), am I going to die, just everything,” Steven told ABC Radio.

    “My main focus was just to get to land and I wasn’t worried about anything else, just to get home.

    “It was dark when I hit land, but I was just looking up at the Rio Tinto wharf and I knew where Delambre (Island) was from there, so I just swam in that direction and found it which was pretty lucky.

    “I was swimming for about five to seven hours maybe, it’s crazy.

    “I am not a good swimmer, but I just swam, I just didn’t want to die, that was my main focus, I just swam.”

    Read news.com.au and see GWN7