Children Injury Prevention

Michael Frogel: The environment where the kids sleep is very important, and we will get to that with preventing sudden infant death syndrome. There shouldn't be anything in the crib of a very young infant that they can choke on. There shouldn't be any of these pillows that can have a depression, so they can't breathe well. The water in your house should be turned down. It shouldn't come burning hot at the tap. You should let your water run in your house for a minute or two, the cold water, because there could be lead in the pipes, and you get lead poison from constantly tricking hot water directly out of the pipes. Playground safety. All these things talk about having a safe environment for the children; where they play, where they live, and what they do. If there are paint chips in your house and your two year old is eating them, obviously that's not a good thing. One other thing here is food prevention, and I will mention it later, be very careful with young children. I don't even let kids up to age five, six, to necessary eat peanuts, because we often see them chopping them and ask for it. There was a news in the five town, the son of a ruff was lifter after choking on a grape, a couple of years ago. You have to be very careful. Hot dogs should not be cut into circles, because they fit very carefully and properly over the airway, which is a dangerous thing. So you need to be very careful about these things. Peanut butter can be too thick for an infant and they can't swallow, it gets stuck in their airway. There have been problems with that; not that we should give children under two peanut butter anyway, but this is lot of allergies. Popcorn, playing with balloons. Little ones again, two year old, sucking on a balloon, they suck on it, it goes in the wrong way, and they aspirate and they get into trouble. We should use the proper safety equipment. Many children have bicycles, they have roller blades, they have skateboards, you name it, they need to wear helmets, and they need to wear them properly. It's a bad corner to not be wearing a helmet when you are riding a bicycle outside. And it's got to be. Seat belts, we will talk about in a minute, car safety, car seats. There is no reason that anyone should not be in a proper restraint in the car. There is no scientific data that you are going to be safer not wearing a seatbelt. It's absolute must, it's wrong. How many children die actually? These are hard things to hear, but in 2002, children from 1 to 14 years old, over 5,000 died from accidents, in 2002. None of these numbers are really going down too much. You can see these numbers here. Injuries, 233,000 hospitalizations, almost 2.5 million visits to the outpatient department, 70 million visits to the doctors' offices. Perhaps, you could almost put some of us out of business, we will find something else to do. Take good care of the kids and be careful. The Center for Disease Control has even more data, and as the kids get older, they don't die of anything except car accidents, suicide, and homicide, very sad commentary. But if you know someone who is depressed and someone who is having problems and issues in dealing with life, or what have you, don't ignore it, call your social people, talk to them, get them help, get them a social worker, get them someone to speak with, especially adolescence. Adolescence tend to have difficult times; as their bodies change, as their psyche change. So if you can help someone in that way -- you can call this number, I am sure they will be able to help you with that kind of issue as well, and give you some data on how to take care of these things. The leading cause of death basically across the board after a year of age is motor vehicle accidents in all age groups, and the second leading cause is drowning, and in older people its homicide. It's phenomenal that car accidents -- it's hard to see this, but basically up until age 44; from 1 to 44, the most common cause of death and disability in the United States is car accidents. So we need to do everything to prevent that. Buy a safe car. When you are buying the car, buy a safe car. This could be a car that costs the same amount of money, that's safer when that's not so safe. If you look at the cause of death in children under a year, most commonly, it's Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which is also preventable, we will talk about, but if not that, an unintentional injury, its suffocation; also preventable. The second leading cause of death in children from injuries is intentional injuries, its homicide, its shaking babies, its children who nub off the parents, the caretaker; it doesn't always have to be a parent, it could be a babysitter, usually it's a parent, will shake them violently and they die or have severe disability.