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Patrick W. O'Carroll, MD, MPH
Centers for Disease Control Atlanta, Ga

Ellen Alkon, MD, MPH; Billie Weiss, MPH
Los Angeles (Calif) County Department of Health Services

JAMA. 1989;261(8):1154.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In Reply. —

Drs Cooper and Griffith correctly point out that the drowning rates presented in our article were based on place of occurrence, not on place of residence. We do not believe, however, that this implies our rate calculations were "erroneous." The detailed information regarding drowning sites on which much of our analysis was based was available only from the coroner's records, which report all drownings that occur in Los Angeles County. Because there are no data regarding the number of individuals generally present in Los Angeles County at any given time, by necessity we used resident population data as the nearest approximation to the person-time at risk. This is a common, if not entirely satisfactory, practice when calculating rates by place of occurrence.^1,2

We agree with Drs Cooper and Griffith that caution should be used when comparing incidence-based and occurrence-based rates. Among Los Angeles County residents, for . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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