Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, drownings and public health.

Caroline Lukazik, an injury prevention expert at the World Health Organization, talks to Stephanie

Desmond about the efforts being made around the world to understand that most drownings

are preventable and what's being done to avert them in countries where water is everywhere

and flooding is common.

Let's listen. Carolyn Lukazek, thanks so much for

joining me. Thanks so much, Stephanie. It's great to be here today. Today I want to talk to you about

drowning and drowning prevention. And I see that you've called it a public health issue. Explain that

to me. So drowning prevention involves a lot of different

sectors and organizations and a lot of different partners because risk factors for drowning are so

incredibly diverse. We look at why people drown, what increases the likelihood of drowning. We can

look at maritime transport safety, making sure people

can use water-based transport-like ferries in a safe situation, making sure young children have

affected adult supervision in community settings, they're not exposed to water, even to the extent

of disaster risk reduction and making sure people are safe around floodwaters.

So we see that drowning prevention is this extremely multisexual issue. However, it does need a home and it does need a lead agency. And we understand that drowning does profoundly impact

in the health and well-being of people. So by framing drowning prevention as a public health issue,

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