Johns Hopkins International Injury Research Unit’s Drowning Project Profiled

In 2014, the Johns Hopkins International Injury Research Unit (JH-IIRU) launched the Drowning Prevention Project, a $10 million initiative funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies aimed at identifying scalable drowning interventions in Bangladesh, a country in which more than 32 children between the ages of 1-4 die due to drowning every day.

As part of this project, JH-IIRU is working collaboration with the International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b) and the Center for Injury Prevention and Research Bangladesh (CIPRB), to initiate the Saving of Lives from Drowning (SoLiD) in Bangladesh. SoLiD is an implementation study that has been established to test the effectiveness of two interventions to prevent and reduce the burden of childhood drowning in Bangladesh. The interventions will be implemented along with family education and community awareness on drowning prevention.

Recently, the work JH-IIRU is doing with SoLiD was profiled by Fountain Ink Magazine, an award-winning narrative magazine based in Chennai, India. In the piece, “The Neglected Issue of Drowning,” JH-IIRU director, Adnan Hyder explains the need to implement drowning interventions, not only in Bangladesh, but in other South Asian countries, like Vietnam and Cambodia, where drowning risks are high because of a lack of physical barriers between a child and a water hazard or a lack of supervision of very young children.

Read “The Neglected Issue of Drowning,” here