NEW YORK - With the hot summer months arriving, a new study warns that caregivers need to be thinking about the drowning hazards posed by portable pools, including inflatable and wading pools.

"Parents need to be aware that these pools can present the same risks for drowning, especially for young children, as in-ground pools" which are typically thought to be a greater safety hazard, said Gary Smith, the study author.

He and his colleagues found 209 recorded cases of children's drowning in these pools between 2001 and 2009, most of them occurring in summer.

"That's a child every five days that is drowning in a backyard portable pool during the summer months," said Smith, head of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

While this doesn't suggest that families shouldn't use inflatable pools or wading pools, parents, he said, need to "put some thought into the safety issues when they go to the store, pick one of these up, and put them up in their backyard".

Smith's team looked back at data compiled from reports to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission on cases of drowning or near-drowning in these types of pools.

Over the nine-year period, they found records of 209 deaths from submersion and 35 non-fatal cases in children age 11 and younger. The number of drowning cases increased between 2001 and 2005, but has leveled off in recent years.

Almost all of those happened to children fewer than 5 years old, and most were in the child's own yard.

The authors found cases of drowning when kids opened the doors of their houses and climbed into the pool using a ladder or another nearby object, as well as examples of children playing in the pool when parents were nearby but were distracted by chores or a phone call.

Parents "can't say they're supervising having a couple drinks at a pool and chatting with their friends or talking on a cell phone", said Linda Quan, a drowning expert at Seattle Children's Hospital.

Reuters