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Shopping Cart Safety

Misplaced Worries or a Real Concern?

By Kelly Burgess

If you've ever wondered how the AAP and similar organizations decide what products they need to warn the public about, look no further than your local emergency room. Every year the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) collects data from a variety of sources, including hospital emergency rooms, regarding injury causes. The subsequent compilations can show if a particular product is causing a large number of injuries.

Dr. M. Denise Dowd, section chief for injury prevention at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., was on the committee that published the shopping cart study. That committee, the AAP Committee on Injury, Violence and Poison Prevention, pays attention to the data that comes from the CPSC, but it also relies on the expertise of its pediatrician members.

"Most of us practice in pediatric emergency rooms, and we've all seen kids injured in accidents related to shopping carts," Dr. Dowd says. "We already intuited it was more common than people realized; the CPSC data just backed up our personal experience."

When a product is found to be causing a disproportionate number of injuries, two things happen: Recommendations are made for modifying the product to decrease the incidence of injuries, and educational materials are released to warn people of possible dangers in their environment so they can take steps to avoid them, if they choose to do so. Sometimes, in the case of products that cause a highly significant number of injuries and deaths – such as automobiles – legislation is passed to mandate safety changes.

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• Talk about it!

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