Fatal drowning statistics from the Netherlands - an example of an aggregated demographic profile.

Introduction: Incompleteness of fatal drowning statistics is a familiar problem impeding public health measures. Part of the problem may be that only data on accidental drowning are used and not the full potential of accessible data.

Methods: This study combines cause-of-death certificates and public prosecutor's court documents between 1998 and 2017 to obtain an aggregated profile.

[Reduction of the drowning risk for young children, but increased risk for children of recently immigrated non-Westerners].

Objective: To describe differences in the risk of drowning of young children (under 10 years) in the Netherlands according to ethnicity and relevant trends since 996.

Design: Retrospective.

Method: We analysed the causes of death data for all 266 children aged 0 to 10 years who died of drowning between 1996 and 2005.

[Background on recent trends in mortality in the Netherlands].

In the Netherlands, a considerable reduction in the annual number of deaths occurred in 2004. This reduction was largely caused by a decrease in the number of deaths from cardiovascular disease. - The risk of dying from cardiovascular disease has decreased in an almost linear manner during the past few decades.