Baby items such as bottles, pacifiers linked to thousands of injuries.
The New York Times (5/14, O’Connor) “Well” blog reports that research “in the journal Pediatrics highlight several under-recognized causes of injury in young children: bottles, pacifiers and sippy cups, which cause thousands of injuries to the mouth and teeth every year, often when toddlers topple over while holding them in their mouths.”
The Washington Post (5/14, Huget) “The Checkup” blog reports that researchers found that over a 20-year period, “more than 45,000 young children had sustained injuries” linked to baby items such as bottles, sippy cups, and pacifiers that were “serious enough to warrant emergency-room treatment.”
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (5/14, Kalson) reports, “Some 83 percent of the wounds were cuts or bruises to the mouth and face or dental injuries after children fell while using the products. Two-thirds of the injuries occurred among one-year-olds, who tend to be unsteady on their feet and prone to tumbles.”
The CNN (5/14) “The Chart” blog reports, “One in five (19.9%) injured children had a pacifier in their mouth, and in 14.3% of the cases, a sippy cup was involved.”
MedPage Today (5/14, Baron-Faust) points out, “This study is the first to use a nationally representative sample to examine injuries associated with these products, the authors stated.”
Button batteries may be life-threatening if swallowed by children. USA Today (5/14, Healy) reports that button batteries “accounted for 84% of the battery-related hospital emergency department visits by children from 1990 to 2009, and once ingested, they can be life-threatening,” according to a study in Pediatrics. “The increase in emergency department visits coincides with the introduction of the 3-volt 20-millimeter lithium battery into the marketplace,” which “is more powerful and can cause tissue damage much more quickly.”
The Wall Street Journal (5/14, Mathews, Subscription Publication) explains that if the batter sticks in the esophagus it can produce burns and even perforations. It also points out that the study made use of the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System.
Food-borne disease declined from 1998 to 2010.
FOX News (5/11, Rowan) reports, “The rate of food-borne illness in the United States dropped by nearly a quarter since the late 1990s,” according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, finding “that the overall incidence of six common food-borne germs was 23 percent lower in 2010 than in the years between 1996 and 1998.” But “the researchers noted that other germs that commonly cause food-borne illness, such as norovirus, were not included in the data.”
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