ABSTRACT
In a prelude to the 1997 UHMS Workshop on Near Drowning, the Chairman made the following statement1 in the pre-workshop correspondence: "As you know, the drowning literature ignores
diving, whilst the diving literature ignores drowning". It is paradoxical that drowning, which causes more than eighty times the number of deaths in recreational divers than either decompression sickness (DCS) or contaminated air, does not rate more than a paragraph or two in some diving medical texts.
