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According to a new study published today in the journal Pediatrics, more than 230,000 children under the age of 15 months were treated in emergency departments of US hospitals between 1990 and 2014.
According to the study, more than 6,500 of them were skull fractures, whose authors actively support the American Pediatric Academy's call to ban the manufacture and sale of baby walkers.
Walkers designed to allow children between the ages of five and fifteen months to move around in a standing frame are controversial for decades.
Baby walkers have raised security concerns that are sufficiently compelling for Canada to ban them in 2004 and for US advocacy groups that have been banning them since 1992.
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They are good parents – they are not negligent. They just missed seconds [during which] these walkers put their child in danger.
Still, baby walkers continue to sell and remain a major cause of injury – sometimes fatal – in babies.
"There is no known benefit or benefit of using an infant walker," said Dr. Gary Smith, lead author of the study and director of the Nationwide Children's Hospital Injury Research and Policy Center.
"Yet, as an emergency physician in pediatrics, I've seen hundreds of these injuries," he said. "And I'm face to face with parents … They're good parents, they're not careless, they just missed seconds [during which] these walkers put their child in danger.
In a walker, an infant can move at a pace of four feet per second – this is much faster than a child as the youngster usually moves, and at a speed that 'even the best parents in the world can not move fast enough to surpass, "said Dr. Smith.
Nearly three-quarters of the injuries occurred after the walker and the child fell down the stairs. Other causes include falls from the walker and injuries caused by the walker giving the child access to something he or she would not normally be able to achieve, such as hot objects that cause burns.
The number of infant-related injuries in infants decreased dramatically during the study period, from 20,650 in 1990 to 2,001 in 2014.
"It's a rare event to see such a dramatic fall in injuries – almost unheard of," said Dr. Smith. This decline was attributed in part to the implementation of safety standards requiring changes to the design of walkers in 1997.
New walkers had to be wider than a standard door or have an integrated mechanism that would prevent a walker from rolling if one or more wheels crossed the edge of a walk.
Then, in June 2010, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) released a mandatory safety standard with even more stringent requirements for the design of baby walkers. This study found that the number of injuries associated with walkers decreased by 23% over the four years following the introduction of the federal mandatory safety standard compared to the previous four years.
Although product warning labels and awareness campaigns have been effective, they do not solve the root cause of the problem.
"The CPSC has taken a risk-reduction approach, which differs from the risk-elimination approach that Canada has taken," said Dr. Smith.
"In my opinion, this is not enough," he said. "These are major injuries when they occur, and they are completely preventable."
Dr. Nicky Mehtani is a physician in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital and is part of the ABC News Medical Unit.
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