Safety for Children

If you are a resident of Tallahassee, Florida, the Tallahassee Police are running what is called a RADKids class aimed at teaching child safety to children. The classes, running from February thru October will teach the children the following safety techniques.

Friend said it’s a self-empowerment class that educates children from 7-12 years old. The classes focus on teaching children what to do and say when a dangerous or uncomfortable situation occurs. The goal is to teach confidence, self-esteem and the power to make good choices. Topics featured are: stranger danger, bullying, dangers in drugs, fire safety, gun safety, assault and abduction safety.

Register your child via email or on the phone at 891-1874.

There is a lot of back and forth going on these days about the validity of the Amber Alert system and whether or not it is worth the time and expense. The abduction of two Pennsylvania girls whom the state would not issue an Alert for has some questioning the system on a whole.

But when Tammy Kongkham allegedly snatched her daughters Kelly and Kimberly outside their Juniata Park school on Oct. 16, Pennsylvania State Police didn’t issue an Amber Alert, which would have publicized the disappearance nationally to faster locate them.

Those involved say that this failure illustrates serious shortcomings in a federal system, implemented in 2002, that missing-persons investigators hoped would hasten the recovery of endangered children and the arrests of their abductors.

Federal law requires all states to have child-abduction alert systems in place, but the varying state-to-state interpretations often cause tension and confusion, according to an Associated Press study published last month.

In Pennsylvania, that criteria requires that a child was abducted and not a runaway or throwaway; the child must also be under 18 years old and believed to be in danger of death or serious bodily harm, according to the state’s Amber Alert Web site.

If you are preparing to travel for the holiday season, have you thought about travel safety for your child? Both car and air travel require child restraint seats for children under a certain age and weight, and if you are flying, you’ll need a child restraint seat for the car when you get where you are going.

Not all car seats can fit on standard airplane seats, which are typically about 16 inches wide, but Safe Kids USA and the Federal Aviation Administration strongly recommend using a car seat in an aircraft whenever possible. As in cars, babies under a year old and 20 pounds are best restrained in a rear-facing car seat, and a forward-facing car seat can protect toddlers up to 40 pounds or more. Make sure your child’s car seat is labeled "certified for use in motor vehicles and aircraft."

"You need your child’s car seat to travel to and from the airport anyway," said Korn. "Car rental companies might not have reliable car seats available and checking your child’s seat as baggage could result in damage. Your kids are better off in their own car seats."

Children who have outgrown car seats should sit directly on the airplane seat and, like all passengers, keep the lap belt buckled across their thighs or hips. Booster seats are not allowed on airplanes, because they require shoulder belts and airplane seats have only lap belts.

NPR, citing the World Heath Organization, reports that almost a million children across the globe die every year stemming from “unintentional injuries”. According to the WHO, once a child reaches the age of nine, an injury becomes the number one cause of death. The causes rank as follows:

1. Road crashes: Kill 260,000 children a year and injure about 10 million. They are the leading cause of death among youths ages 10 to 19, and a leading cause of child disability.

2. Drowning: Kills more than 175,000 children annually. Up to 3 million children each year survive a drowning incident. Due to brain damage in some survivors, nonfatal drowning has the highest average lifetime health and economic impact of any type of injury.
 
3. Burns: Fire-related burns kill nearly 96,000 children a year, and the death rate is 11 times higher in low- and middle-income countries than in high-income countries.
 
4. Falls: Nearly 47,000 children fall to their deaths every year, but hundreds of thousands more sustain less serious injuries from a fall.
 
5. Poisoning: More than 45,000 children die each year from unintended poisoning.

After amounts of a substance known as melamine were found to have killed several babies in China and made another 50,000 sick, concerns over child safety were raised when trace amounts of the same chemical were found in American formulas. At the moment there is no definitive research on what would be considered a “safe” level of melamine in formula, which is used to simulate protein, but many are calling for the recall of the contaminated formula.

According to FDA data for tests of 77 infant formula samples, a trace concentration of melamine was detected in one product — Mead Johnson‘s Infant Formula Powder, Enfamil LIPIL with Iron. An FDA spreadsheet shows two tests were conducted on the Enfamil, with readings of 0.137 and 0.14 parts per million. Three tests of Nestle‘s Good Start Supreme Infant Formula with Iron detected an average of 0.247 parts per million of cyanuric acid, a melamine byproduct.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., who heads a panel that oversees the FDA budget, said the agency was taking a "marketplace first, science last" approach.

"The FDA should be insisting on a zero-tolerance policy for melamine in domestic infant formula until it is able to determine conclusively based on sound independent science that the trace levels would not pose a health risk to infants," DeLauro said.