A Parents’ Guide to Childhood Hazards
By Ed Edelson, HealthScoutNews Reporter
HealthScoutNews — A baby’s life is filled with firsts. And knowing when they might arrive could help you protect your child from serious injury or worse.
For example, researchers at the University of California, Irvine say:
– In the first two months of life, the biggest cause of injury is falling from a height;
– months 6 to 8, falls from furniture;
– months 9 to 11, getting an object stuck in the throat;
– months 12 to 17, burns from hot liquid and vapors;
– months 18 through 35, poisoning — most often from medications that an adult leaves unguarded.
Alert parents can help prevent many of those injuries.
But in too many cases, parental abuse is to blame — for months three to five, child battering is the most frequent cause of injury, the researchers say.
The UC-Irvine researchers got their data from 1996-1998 California hospital discharges and death certificates. Their findings appear in the June issue of Pediatrics.
The time for parents to be most alert is months 15 through 17, says Craig Anderson, a specialist at the university’s Center for Health Policy and Research. “That’s when children are more mobile and able to get into things and have very little understanding of hazards,” he adds.
“Parents should expect the unexpected,” says Dr. Phyllis F. Agran, a professor of pediatrics at UC-Irvine, and a co-author of the study. “A child that age is developing so rapidly that you have to keep ahead of her and provide an environment in which she can use her new abilities in a safe way.”
Anderson says this study is the first of its kind. Others have looked at specific kinds of injuries but “not with this level of detail on such a wide variety of injuries,” he says.
As for child battering, Anderson says, “It is striking at how young an age it happens and how important it is to intervene to help parents.”
“We were surprised about the early age of peak incidence of battering,” Agran agrees. “The message is for health-care providers to be alert for the risk factors for maltreatment and help families get to the resources they need to help prevent this kind of injury.”
As a child learns to walk, parents should be especially vigilant about pedestrian injuries, she says.
“A child gets in a driveway behind a vehicle, the driver can’t see the child and backs up into her,” Agran says.
Pedestrian injuries and injuries inside an auto occur at the same rate at 12 to 14 months of age, the report says. Then the pedestrian injury rate begins to climb sharply, double that of the auto occupant rate at 15 to 17 months.
Pedestrian injuries are the leading cause of all injuries for the 3-to-5-year age group, the study says.
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On the Net:
American Academy of Pediatrics
University of California, San Francisco
University of California, Irvine
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