Articles Posted in Injuries to Minors

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On a day when the NFL has settled a landmark lawsuit over player concussion (a subject on which I’ll write more later this week) it is worth remembering the measures closer to home that we all need to take to protect our kids from traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries.

A recent report published by SafeKids Oregon outlines the scope of the situation: Last year 1.35 million children arrived in emergency rooms with sports related injuries. Fourteen percent of those injuries were to the head. The group at greatest risk are 12-15-year-olds, who account for nearly half of all youth sports injuries. Though football is the sport we most often associate with concussions and other head injuries, among young athletes the most dangerous sport in terms of concussions was ice hockey which, all by itself, accounts for 31% of all youth sports concussions. Football accounts for only 13%, a bit behind wrestling and tied with soccer. The study notes that in sports played by both boys and girls the latter tend to report higher incidence of concussions, but speculates that this may have more to do with social pressures than with the relative tendency of boys and girls to suffer from the injuries.

Most importantly, however, the study notes that “a Governor’s signature is the beginning of the game, not the fourth quarter.” Put another way: state laws designed to protect young athletes are only as good as the parents and coaches who enforce them. SafeKids Oregon notes that the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers a free online training program, known as “Heads Up”, for adults supervising youth sports.

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It is one of those things every parent fears: a child suffering and injured after having been locked in a hot car. It is something few of us can dream of doing, and that even fewer could stand by and watch.

Yet here in Oregon it happened once again, just this week. According to Portland TV station KGW a man in Tigard has been cited by local police “after leaving his small child in a hot car in the parking lot of a Tigard home improvement store. A store employee broke the window of the car when he saw that a baby had been left inside.”

The employee who rescued the 10 or 11 month old child is quoted as saying that the boy appeared to have been alone in the car for approximately 20 minutes. The father identified his baby as the rescuer and other bystanders were working to cool the child down inside the store. Police were called. The TV station reports that they did not cite the man at the scene of the incident, but that “investigators later charged the father with second-degree child neglect, a misdemeanor.”

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The case of a 15-year-old Vancouver boy who drowned last year while attending a church-run summer camp may soon be headed to court. Today’s Oregonian reports that the victim’s estate has filed a $13 million lawsuit against the camp and its organizers.

According to the paper, the boy died just over a year ago when he fell while walking behind the waterfall at White River Falls, near Maupin. A 26-year old counselor also drowned in the incident when he dove into the water in an attempt to save the boy.

Looking at this incident from a legal perspective a number of negligence issues arise and significant questions of responsibility. It is worth remembering that 15-year-olds are still children and require trained adult supervision when in an environment like a summer camp. The reports that the boy had been encouraged by the camp organizers to walk behind the waterfall are potentially very serious, and, if confirmed, they could be evidence of highly irresponsible behavior on the part of the camp’s organizers. At a very basic level, the fact that, based on the media reports, no one on the outing seems to have been wearing a life preserver or to have had any other life-saving gear on hand is deeply troubling.

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An Associated Press report republished by the Salem Statesman-Journal this month is distressing. According to the news agency, a 3-year-old girl was critically injured in Oregon City when the child “fell into a crawl space.”

This was not, however, an at-home accident. The crawl space was in a house that the girl’s mother was viewing along with a real estate agent. In fact, there is some evidence that the accident could have been worse. “Clackamas County fire officials say the girl was playing with her brother beneath stairs near the hatch to the crawl space” at the time of the accident, according to the news agency.

While controlling one’s children is ultimately a parent’s responsibility, the details of this Oregon child injury accident raise a number of unsettling questions related to Oregon premises liability. A homeowner who places a house on the market for sale has a responsibility to ensure that it is safe – or that potential buyers are warned well in advance that they are visiting an unsafe property. Responsibility for conveying this information to buyers and other potential visitors, in turn, passes to a real estate agent when that agent brings someone onto a property to view it. Parents viewing a potential family home should not be confronted with a safety problem of this seriousness when they are merely visiting the property for a look.

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Today marks the start of National Window Safety Week (April 7-13). With the seasons changing, and warmer weather settling in, that makes this an especially opportune moment to remind parents of simple but important ways to avoid tragic Oregon injuries to children during the coming months.

Here in Portland this is not an abstract issue. As a recent article in The Oregonian noted, “during one terrible week last June, four children in the Portland area were injured when they plunged through windows to the ground.” I wrote about several of these incidents at the time – see here and here – and salute the work SafeKids Oregon (where I serve as a member of the Advisory Board), the Oregon Public Health Division and Randall Children’s Hospital are doing to raise public awareness of this issue all the year round, but during this week in particular.

The centerpiece of the Window Safety Week campaign is the ‘Stop at 4 inches’ initiative which reminds parents of the importance of keeping small children out of danger by using window stops. As part of the awareness activities taking place this week Randall Children’s Hospital is making window stops and other home child safety gear available through its Hospital Safety Center. On the Washington side of the Columbia River the video blog Vancouver Side has produced a set of helpful videos on window safety to mark this week. You can see them here.

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On Tuesday the Oregon Senate passed by a wide margin a bill that would allow children of any age to ride motorcycles, dirt bikes and other off-road ATVs. Let me be frank, it is hard to see how any responsible parent would allow a child that young to ride a motorized vehicle, but we all know that some will. Though presented during debate as a matter of personal freedom, this is truly a case in which society’s interest in protecting children has to be balanced against a conception of ‘freedom’ so individualistic that it comes to pose a threat to everyone else.

As reported in The Oregonian, Senate Bill 238 passed the Oregon Senate 22-7 with support from 12 Republicans and 10 Democrats. All but one of the seven ‘no’ votes came from Democrats. Supporters tout the measure “as a way to improve safety for young and off-road riders because it requires anyone under 16 to meet minimum size requirements, known as a “rider fit” test” before they can be certified to operate ATVs and other off-road vehicles. The paper notes, however, that another provision of the bill repeals the existing prohibition on children under age seven riding such vehicles. In other words, SB 238 would allow children at the ages of six, five or even four – children who might not yet have the balance to ride a bicycle – to sit atop a powerful quad-ATV and ride not only on their family’s property but also on public lands throughout the state.

It seems contradictory to toughen basic safety requirements for children in general while removing a common sense ban designed to protect small children – children whose cognitive ability, motor skills and general perception of danger are not sufficiently developed to operate a motor vehicle, even under parental supervision. Ironically, this bill passed the senate even as Oregon and the rest of the country are marking national brain injury awareness month, a time designed to focus attention on the dangers traumatic brain injuries pose to kids here and elsewhere.

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See the link below for an interesting story from yesterday’s Oregonian on a new study focusing on teen driving fatalities nationwide. The good news: Oregon and Washington “are among the nation’s safest states for 16- and 17-year-old drivers, according to a new report by the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA).” The bad news: nationwide, teen driving deaths rose significantly during the first half of 2012.

In an effort to tackle popular misconceptions, the newspaper notes that: “Among road users, aging drivers are often thought to be the biggest hazard. But teen motorists are less experienced and (are) on the road more frequently, experts say.”

Oregon recorded just one teen driving fatality during the first six months of 2012 (the period covered by the study), compared with none during the comparable period in 2011. In Washington the year-to-year difference was dramatic: no fatalities among 16 and 17-year-olds from January through June of 2012 compared to 16 in 2011. Nationally, 240 16- and 17-year-olds died in crashes during the first half of 2012, compared with 202 the year before, a 19 percent increase.

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An article published this week in the online magazine Slate makes a compelling case that the Consumer Product Safety Commission, an organization many of us think of as an important guardian of Americans’ safety and rights, could do a lot more to make its own workings transparent.

The article begins with a simple example: “Sometime before October 2011, an unknown child was injured by an unknown product that was produced by an unknown manufacturer. The Consumer Product Safety Commission published a report of the injury in its online database of safety complaints.” It also notes that the unnamed company has so far been able to contest what it views as inaccurate charges that its product is unsafe by filing a secret lawsuit against the CPSC, all the while keeping its name, its product and the allegations against it from being identified in the CPSC database.

Perhaps even more shocking is the revelation that when a federal court in Maryland allowed the secret suit to go forward, accepting the company’s argument that letting people know it was being sued might be bad for business, the government opted not to appeal that decision. According to Slate three consumer-advocate groups have since then been “granted permission to intervene by the court in October (and) are pressing on” with the appeal that the federal government refused to lodge.

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An Oregon wrongful death lawsuit filed recently in Chiloquin raises new questions about the conduct of an area children’s center that has had a rocky relationship with state and local authorities.

According to the Klamath Falls Herald & News, the Oregon wrongful death suit against Kleos Children’s Community and the Klamath County Department of Human Services alleges that “a wheelchair-bound 14-year-old placed at Kleos under the directive of DHS died as a result of complications from two bilateral fractures to both femurs” as a result of a November 2010 accident.

The paper and local television station KOBI report that the suit claims that DHS was negligent in placing the child at a facility that, it says, could not properly address his “medical and physical needs.” The newspaper reports that the suit claims that Kleos was negligent in its treatment of the boy – both in initiating the actions that resulted in the accident, and, later, in its treatment of him following the incident. The boy died a day after suffering the two broken legs “when two employees of Kleos dropped him while trying to move him from his wheelchair to a new location.”

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Now that Thanksgiving is over and Christmas, Hanukkah and the New Year are fast approaching it is a good time to remember that holiday joy should also be tempered with a measure of caution. Earlier this month the US Public Interest Research Group released its annual survey of dangerous toys, Trouble in Toyland. It is a reminder that parents need to take care during the coming weeks to ensure that unsafe products do not threaten their families.

The issue here is not so much the common dangers that any responsible parent is always aware of – choking hazards, for example (though, to be clear, these remain very real). Rather it is with manufacturing problems that parents may not immediately be able to see, but which pose a risk of death or serious injury to unsuspecting children.

Trouble in Toyland notes that “toys with high levels of toxic substances are still on store shelves, as well as toys with lead content above the 100 parts per million limit.” It also expresses particular concern about toys containing “small powerful magnets that pose a dangerous threat to children if swallowed.”

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