Why are rebreather divers dying?
The first and keynote address was by Dr. Claes Lundgren who reviewed new developments in the field of breath-hold diving. For 1000 years in Korea and Japan the Ama, mostly women, have been harvesting seafood by breath-hold diving earning about US$250 per day. He then turned to the latest in “extreme sports”, that of record breaking depth attempts for breath-hold diving. The last time he had presented data the world record was 136 metres held by Pipin Ferreras. Now the record, again by Ferreras, was 163 metres. He also pointed out that the women breath-hold divers were close. These extreme limits are well beyond what has been predicted as breath-hold limits by physicians and researchers. The challenges in breath-hold diving are chest squeeze, blood redistribution, hypoxia, the diving response, barotrauma, narcosis and drowning. The other big three breath-hold divers, Enzo Majorca and daughters Patricia and Roxanna have been studied extensively in his lab by Lundgren. The method of desce
