NEW YORK (Reuters Health)
— Dr. Linda Quan lost count of the number of children she
watched slowly die from drowning. But she will never forget the pain
on the faces of her patients' parents when she broke the news to
them.
That pain spurred the Seattle emergency room
pediatrician to advocate for a Washington state law that now
requires children 12 years and younger to wear life vests aboard
small recreational boats.
In a new study published in the journal Injury Prevention, Quan and
her colleagues find that boaters mandated to wear life jackets were
the most likely to wear them. She calls on policymakers to extend
the law to children between 13 and 17 years old.
"It's just as bad to lose a 17-year-old as it is to lose a
three-year-old," she told Reuters Health. "So why aren't we trying
to protect them?"
Drowning is the second leading cause of unintentional injury-related
deaths of U.S. children ages one to 14, second only to motor vehicle
accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.
In 2012, U.S. Coast Guard statistics show 459 boaters drowned. More
than 82 percent of them were not wearing life jackets.
"This is a preventable injury," said Quan, from Seattle Children's
Hospital. "Life jackets make sense. They save lives."
Her team's study included 5,157 Washington boaters on 33 waterways
throughout the state over two summer weekends in 2010. Observers
viewed boaters through high-powered binoculars and recorded their
gender, their estimated age, type and length of boat, weather and
water conditions and life-jacket use.
Washington law requires life jackets to be worn by water skiers and
others being towed and by boaters on personal watercraft, or jet
skis, as well as by children 12 and under in small vessels.
Federal law mandates that boats carry life jackets for all
passengers, but it does not require that they be worn. A patchwork
of state laws governs life-jacket wear.
Quan's study found the average rate of life-jacket use overall was
only 31 percent and just 21 percent in motorboats.
When legally mandated, however, boaters were two to three times more
likely to wear life jackets, the study found. Life vest use was 80
percent among children six to 12 years old, 89 percent among
children five and younger and nearly 97 percent among jet skiers.
"In other words, they listen to the law," Quan said.
The study also found that teenagers were more likely to put on life
jackets if an adult on the boat wore one. Adolescents were twice as
likely to wear life jackets as adult boaters — a finding Quan
attributes to the teens having to wear life jackets when they were
younger.
Quan believes her study shows that efforts to educate boaters — when
not accompanied by legal mandates — may largely fall on deaf ears.
National life-jacket use rates have hovered between 21 and 23
percent since the late 1990s, despite a concerted effort to convince
boaters of the importance of personal flotation devices, the study
says.
All states except Virginia and Wisconsin require child boaters to
wear life jackets, with the cutoff age varying from six to 12 years
old, Thomas Mangione told Reuters Health. Mangione, who works for
the nonprofit JSI Research and Training Institute in Boston, was not
involved in the current research but has studied the issue for the
Coast Guard.
"Basically, Americans are law-abiding," he said. "When there are
regulations, people comply."
Quan said she would look for a Washington state legislator to write
a law to extend life jacket regulations up to age 17.
"We really are very interested in not just protecting the toddler
but the adolescent and young adult because they have the next
highest risk of dying," she said.
Chris Edmonston, president of the BoatU.S. Foundation for Boating
Safety and Clean Water, told Reuters Health he could not comment on
legislation that has not yet been drafted. But his group, based in
Annapolis, Maryland and Alexandria, Virginia, has lobbied against
life-jacket laws and promotes education over regulation.
"My opinion is that not many children are dying in boating
accidents because they weren't wearing a life jacket in Washington,"
he said.
"Some people say that if you save one life, it's worth having a new
law," Edmonston said. "But looking at the statistics for the past
decade, some would say it's hard to make an argument that a new law
is needed."
Efforts to educate boaters about the importance of wearing life
jackets are working, Edmonston said.
But Quan's investigation and another recent study suggest otherwise,
researchers said.
In a study published last month in the Journal of Public Health
Policy, Mangione compared the results of a California campaign to
educate boaters to wear life jackets with the results of a
Mississippi demonstration project mandating life jackets on some
lakes.
Adult life-jacket use skyrocketed from less than 14 percent to
nearly 76 percent during the first year of the Mississippi law
requiring the vests, Mangione's study found. At the same time, the
California educational program showed only a modest gain, from 8.5
percent to 12 percent in the first year.
"We think the best situation is where there would be mandatory
regulations and education to support these regulations," Mangione
said.
"Education's really important," Quan said. "But there's no question
it has limited effectiveness."
