Medical & Fitness

Join the DAN Team and Help Make Diving Safer

• DAN seeks a safety services coordinator to support its educational, safety-development, and outreach programs. Duties include monitoring and developing injury-prevention initiatives and fielding risk mitigation and training inquiries. This person will communicate with dive operators, dive professionals, and the public about mitigating risk and promoting operational safety in diving.

(File photo) Hyperbaric chamber at Rigshospitalet, the Danish national hospital
(File photo) Hyperbaric chamber at Rigshospitalet, the Danish national hospital

Hyperbaric chambers in NW Florida unavailable to divers

In a region already woefully short of adequate hyperbaric emergency services for divers, chambers from Mississippi to Northwest Florida are reportedly now filling up with Covid-19 patients fighting for their lives.

As reported earlier on this site, the closest decompression chambers to the popular Oriskany dive site and Florida Panhandle Shipwreck Trail are in Mobile, Alabama which is out of state—or in Fort Myers, more than 600 miles away.

Richard Moon, M.D., Named 2021 DAN/Rolex Diver of the Year

Dr. Moon is a professor of anesthesiology at Duke University and the medical director of the Duke Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology. He is also a former medical director of DAN.

Throughout his 40-year career in dive medicine and research, Dr. Moon has sought to gain a better understanding of cardiorespiratory function on the human body when subjected to environmental conditions such as being deep underwater or at high altitude.

DAN Welcomes 2021 Research and Safety Interns

Clockwise from top right: Grant Dong, Christine Tamburri, Gabriel Graf, Rhiannon Brenner, Benjamin Kistler

The DAN Internship Program was created more than 20 years ago to give qualifiedstudents valuable experience in dive safety research. While the program is still research-oriented, its scope has expanded over the years to include projects that focus on other facets of DAN’s mission to help divers in need of emergency medical assistance and to promote dive safety through education. 

Stings & Scrapes - Part 1

While the most exotic of these potentially dangerous organisms are fairly well known, the more mundane sometimes cause uncertainty. Know what’s most likely to cause an injury on your next dive so you can relax and enjoy making bubbles.

In part one of this two-part series we’ll refresh your knowledge of wound care and treating common marine stings; next month we’ll cover injuries that involve scrapes, bites and penetrating wounds.

DCS Risk Factors

A recent big-data study performed by a DAN Europe research team used modern statistical analysis techniques to dig into a sample of nearly 40,000 open-circuit recreation dives and look for patterns and clues about DCS risk factors in real-world cases. Some of what they’ve found confirms our previous knowledge and opens entirely new avenues for research into the factors that contribute to DCS risk. Here’s what we’ve learned.