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 Almost 17,000 children under age 6 were treated for injuries from
window blinds in U.S. emergency departments from 1990 to 2015,
researchers report online December 11 in Pediatrics. That translates
to an injury rate of almost 3 out of every 100,000 kids.
Most of the time, the injuries weren’t serious. But there were 228
cases when young children caught their necks in cords and two-thirds
of these injuries were fatal.
While the majority of children were treated and released, there was
still about one child death each month - most from strangulation
when a child became entangled by the neck in a window blind cord.
“The findings of this study confirm that children continue to die
from strangulation on window blind cords,” said senior author Dr.
Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at
Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. “This is
unacceptable.”
“We’ve known about this problem since the 1940s,” Smith said by
email. “We have had a voluntary safety standard in this country
since the mid-1990s and we’ve had product recalls, and yet we
continue to see these deaths.”
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission approved a petition to
develop mandatory safety standards for window coverings in 2014,
Smith said. Unlike current voluntary standards designed to reduce
the risk of strangulation, the proposed mandatory standards would
require all window coverings to be cordless or have cords that are
inaccessible to children.
“Cordless technologies are available for most blinds and shades and
add little cost to manufacturing,” Smith said. “What we need now is
for manufacturers to simply eliminate accessible cords in their
products so that children can’t gain access to them.”
Almost two-thirds of the injuries children in the study sustained
were head injuries, most often cuts, contusions and abrasions.
In almost half of the cases, the blinds struck kids, and cuts were
the next most common mechanism of injury. Overall, about 12 percent
of cases involved kids getting entangled in cords.
The majority of the cases occurred when parents were home with kids,
but adults witnessed very few of the injuries. Often children were
put to sleep, playing or watching television when injuries occurred.
When kids were alone, they often were unsupervised for less than 10
minutes before they got hurt.
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One limitation of the study is that it only includes cases treated
at hospitals and may underestimate the true injury rate associated
with window coverings, the authors note. Researchers also lacked
detailed information on the exact types of blinds involved in
strangulation cases.
Even so, the findings suggest that voluntary safety standards aren’t
enough to prevent serious injuries, said Dr. Sean Bandzar, an
emergency medicine researcher at New York Presbyterian Hospital who
wasn’t involved in the study.
This means parents need to be vigilant.
“The majority of injuries in this study occurred while children were
under the care of parents with the children placed to sleep or
playing,” Bandzar said by email. “Better parental supervision should
be encouraged.”Aiming baby monitors or cameras at blinds should help
parents keep an eye on kids near windows at night or other times
when they’re not in the room, he suggested.
If replacing blinds with dangling cords isn’t feasible or
affordable, parents should focus their efforts on the rooms where
kids spend the most time, like bedrooms or living rooms, Smith
advised. Moving furniture away from windows so kids don’t have an
easy way to climb and reach blinds can also help.
Child safety kits designed to keep blinds out of reach don’t always
prevent kids from getting injured, he added.
“Some of the fixes can provide a false sense of security,” Smith
said. “The best way to keep your children safe is to replace all
blinds that have cords with either cordless blinds, blinds with
inaccessible cords or other types of cordless window coverings, such
as interior window shutters.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2BUpwxW Pediatrics, online December 11, 2017.
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