Statistics

[srazz01]

I am looking for a site where I can get statistics on how many certified divers there are total and for last year and how many fatlities there were. This is for a college course.

 

[gene02]

You may want to contact blue grotto in Florida they are a privately owen dive site that works with a lot of schools in the area I am sure they would know there numbers. The guy that runs the place seem to be a nice guy I would think he would share that info with you for school.

 

[rstofer]

Contact DAN (Divers Alert Network) for most of your accident statistics. But even they are only aware of a small subset of the data.

You will never get the number of certified divers. Even if you did, the number is meaningless because certification is a lifetime situation. There are MANY more certified divers than there are divers in the water.

PADI.com publishes the number of new certifications in the Statistics section of their website. I am not aware that any other agencies do this. PADI is the largest but I doubt they do 50% of the total.

There are a lot of overseas divers and certifications about which you will find no information. Not even tthe accident data.

Nor can you get even the order of magnitude of dives per year worldwide. No records are kept in any formalized manner.

I hope this isn't an important project because all of your data will be trash.

Richard

 

[Damselfish]

I would think DAN has the most/best info, and all they can report is the absolute number of various issues that they happen to know of. Which is far from everything, and not reported as a percentage of anything since they've got no clue what that is.

 

[gene02]

I misunder stood the question, Yes DAN wood have a better scoop on US or World stats.

OOOPPPPSSS!

 

[vladimir]

Keeping in mind the legitimate obstacles raised by rstofer, I would be tempted to extrapolate from a data set like the one gene02 cited, and attempt to correct for the differences in populations.

 

[don Francisco]

Other than recommending DAN as a resource as others have done, I can't help you with data sources, but I do have a suggestion that could help overall.

If you're studying the dive accident rates, forget about counting certified divers. As someone else pointed out since certification lasts a lifetime, that becomes a meaningless number. There's no way to account for certified divers who no longer dive and, like Cook County, IL voter registrations', the agencies lists of certified divers include lots of people who've died but are still counted.

Even if you somehow got it down to only active divers, that still isn't a good base. The variation in the number of annual dives is tremendous running from 10 or less to about 500 or so, with an average probably of about 20-30. (a guestimate based on the very large cluster at the low end of the scale).

What you might try to research is the number of dives themselves, since that's the most relevant data for considering accident rates.

 

[Gene_Hobbs]

When calling/ emailing DAN, ask for a copy of this recent publication. (As the authors, they can probably send it to you):

Denoble PJ, Pollock NW, Vaithiyanathan P, Caruso JL, Dovenbarger JA, Vann RD. Scuba injury death rate among insured DAN members. Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine. 2008; 38: 182-188.

We calculated the annual rates of diving-related deaths among DAN-insured members in the period from 2000 to 2006 and investigated the effects of age and sex on death rate by logistic regression. We determined relative risks for divers < 50 and >= 50 years of age for drowning, arterial gas embolism, and cardiac incidents, the three most common disabling injuries associated with diving death. There were 1,141,367 insured member-years and 187 diving-related deaths. Males made up 64% of the members. Individuals >= 50 years of age constituted 31% of the fatalities. Insured mean age increased from 40 +/- 12 to 43 +/- 13 years over the seven-year study period. Annual fatality rates varied between 12.1 and 22.9 (average 16.4, 95% confidence intervals 14.2, 18.9) per 100,000 persons insured. The relative risk for male divers in their thirties was six times greater than the risk for female divers in the same age range. Fatality rates increased with age for both sexes, but the higher relative risk for males progressively decreased until the rates became similar for both sexes after age 60. Death associated with cardiac incidents was 12.9 times more likely in divers >= 50 years of age. We recommend that older divers adjust their participation in diving according to health status and physical fitness, maintain fitness with regular exercise, and abstain from diving in conditions likely to require unaccustomed physical activity.

NOTE: This is a new publication so it will not be in our database for quite some time per our embargo with SPUMS.

Since this is a school project, you might also find our "diving fatalities suggested reading list" useful.



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[Walter]

The information you want does not exist.

 

[vladimir]

Excerpts from an Undercurrent.org article published a couple of years ago that might be helpful:

http://www.undercurrent.org/members/UCnow/issues/y2007/UC0607/DiversPopulations200706.pdf

NAUI, SSI and PADI all agreed that DAN has the most
relevant data. Ironically, DAN says its efforts to collect better
information for its annual fatality reports are often stymied by
the training agencies. "We used to get some data from them,
but they're quite proprietary now and no longer share," says
spokesperson Renee Duncan. "That's why for collecting acci-
dent fatalities, we get a skewed number. Even if there's fewer
than 1,000 accidents every year, we still don't know what kind
of percentage that is.
DAN recently issued its 2006 report on decompression sick-
ness and dive fatalities. According to data collected between
1998 and 2004, the DCS rate among warm-water divers fluctu-
ated from zero to 5 cases per 100,000 dives. The annual fatality
rate between 1997 and 2004 ranged from 11 to 18 deaths per
100,000 DAN members per year. But because DAN can only
realistically track fatality rates for its own members, it can't
extrapolate those figures to the entire diver population. It also
follows media reports of U.S. and Canadian divers deaths but
only for those happening in North American waters. Accounts
of North American divers dying in Caribbean, South Pacific
and other foreign bodies of water often fall through the cracks.

Canada found a good way to measure safety statistics
through its Abacus Project, the results of which were released
a couple of years ago. Abacus was a field survey conducted
during a 14-month period starting in October 1999 in British
Columbia. The goal was to establish the risk of death and non-
fatal decompression illness in recreational scuba diving. Every
dive shop and charter operator in BC was asked to count the
number of tanks that were filled for recreational diving. For
the same time period, hyperbaric chambers reported the num-
ber of BC divers treated for nonfatal DCI, and the provincial
coroners records were reviewed for scuba fatalities. There were
146,291 fills, three fatalities and 14 cases of nonfatal DCI. The
incidence of recreational scuba death was 0.00002 percent
(2.05/100,000 dives). The incidence of nonfatal DCI was 0.010
percent (9.57/100,000 dives).