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US sees 'hot-tub related injuries' increase triplefold

Horrific 'body part entanglement' <cough> bloodbath

According to a recent study, those US citizens who manage to survive swine flu, terrorists, meteor strikes, guvmint agents fixin' to pry their guns from their cold dead fingers and other such perils of the modern age are still doomed. They will almost certainly be killed - or anyway badly injured - in some kind of horrific hot-tub-related accident.

The news comes courtesy of a recent report from the Center for Injury Research and Policy, now published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Investigating researchers found, broadly speaking, that Americans' fatal predilection for large whirlpool baths may eventually render them extinct, sweeping the USA clean of life in a terrifying, bubbly, erm, bloodbath.

“Although some steps have been taken to make hot tubs safer, increased prevention efforts are needed,” says Dr Lara McKenzie of the CIRP.

According to the Centre, hot-tub related injuries have skyrocketed in recent times. McKenzie says that "unintentional hot tub-related injuries increased by 160 percent, from approximately 2,500 to more than 6,600 injuries per year" over the period 1990-2007. And that's just the unintentional ones.

The CIRP data says that "lacerations were the most commonly reported injuries" and that "the lower extremities (27 percent) and the head (26 percent) were the most frequently injured body parts". The report also speaks of horrific "tub-related injuries associated with suction drains (such as entanglement, body entrapment and drowning)".

It's clear that installing one of these fearful Charybdis-like watery portals to the netherworld in your home is about as survivable as trying to fight off a pack of intruding wild monkeys on one's balcony.

The only household object which is managing to crank up its kill rate faster than the hot-tub, it would seem, is that terrifying engine of death the computer, whose annual score has increased by a shocking 700+ per cent over much the same period - a factoid revealed by none other than Dr McKenzie, as it happens.

Details of the hot-tub terror epidemic are available here. ®

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