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American pediatricians are renewing their decades-old call to ban baby walkers, saying they do not offer any benefit in developing babies, but can give them mobility in places where they risk getting pregnant. 39; be injured – stairs, pools and kitchens with hot appliances. Doctors have renewed their concern in the light of a new study that shows that more than 2,000 infants a year are being treated in hospital emergency rooms for injuries sustained while zooming in on wheelchairs with saucer-shaped wheels.
Walker-related injuries subsided after the federal government's 2010 standards required brakes and other safety features, but pediatricians said that too many children were still injured, some with potentially disabling brain damage. One of the co-authors of the study is a pediatrician whose patients included babies who landed head first on concrete after going down a flight of stairs while they were tied to a walker for babies.
The study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics examined the estimated cases of 230,675 children under 15 months treated in American emergency rooms for wounded-related injuries from 1990 to 2014.
More than 90% of them had head and neck injuries and just over 74% were injured when they walked down the steps of their walkers. About 4.5% of the babies had to be hospitalized, of which nearly 38% for skull fractures.
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The US Consumer Product Safety Commission joined pediatricians in the call for the ban in 1992, and in 2010 reinforced safety requirements in the manufacture and testing of baby walkers.
According to the authors of the study, wounds decrease with increasing awareness of the dangers represented by walkers. According to the authors of the study, from 1990 to 2003, injuries and injuries due to falling stairs decreased by 84.5% and 91% respectively.
And, in the four years following the implementation of the federal government's safety standards, Walker-related injuries have decreased by almost 23%.
"This decrease can, in part, be attributable to the norm as well as other factors, such as lowering the consumption of baby walkers and decreasing the number of older baby walkers in homes", wrote the authors.
The study, the first to examine whether higher standards for baby walkers had reduced emergency room visits, concluded that they, like other factors, probably decreased use and fewer older models in American homes.
Infant walkers remain an important and preventable source of injury in young children, which supports the call of the American Academy of Pediatrics to ban their manufacture and sale in the United States, write the authors.
Not only are the walkers dangerous, they "have no benefit whatsoever and should not be sold in the United States, "Dr. Benjamin Hoffman, a pediatrician who chairs the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Injury, Violence and Poison Prevention, told NPR.
Dr. Gary Smith, lead author of the study and director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, said: "There is absolutely no reason so that these products are still on the market ".
Babies can move four feet per second when they are tied to walkers, and it's faster than their parents, Smith said.
"The parents bought the myth that, if they watched their kids carefully, they would not have any problems," Smith told NPR. "But it was a myth".
Canada banned baby walkers in 2004 after scientific analysis of data from Health Canada's Canadian Injury Reporting and Injury Prevention Program.
The United States should follow the example of Canada, say Smith and Hoffman, who practice at the University of Health and Sciences of Oregon in Portland.
Photo via Shutterstock
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