Keeping Cool

July 10, 2011 was Health Day here in Oklahoma. It’s time to reflect on an aspect of safe summer health.

For some people, a picnic isn’t a picnic unless they down a few cold beers. And if they are at a lake for that picnic, they might not realize that they could cause themselves some severe problems with their drinking.

No, there’s no police lifeguard that is going to come around and give you a breathalyzer test before letting you jump off the diving board into a pool. There’s not likely to even be someone who will stop you from driving a boat, or skiing, though there is a regulation against speedboat driving while you are under the influence.

The fact is that alcohol is involved in about half of all of the water-recreation deaths of teens and adults each year. That’s a good number of people who went out for a day of fun and died – and really didn’t need to. Even worse when the one who dies was the innocent bystander.

The problem begins because alcohol’s immediate effect is on the judgment area of the brain. With a little sauce inside you, your brain doesn’t come to the correct conclusions anymore. Some soused swimmers exercise poor judgment and takes risks that they would not have otherwise. They may swim out too far and be unable to make it back to shore. They might not realize that they are cold, and they will suffer from hypothermia. They might misjudge the depth and dive into an area that is too shallow.

Since alcohol also slows down the physical responses of the body, a drinker is likely to end up bumping into others or falling off of the diving board improperly.

60 percent of boating accidents can be traced back to the drinking of alcohol. According to the NIAAA (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism) even the small concentration of 0.1 percent will make a person 16 times more likely to be killed in a boating accident than someone who has drunk no alcohol at all. That’s really only about one beer for most people.

The wisest idea is to decide whether your enjoyment of “a cold one” refers to the alcoholic beverage or the lake/pool. It’s obvious that the two do not really mix.