|
Hyperthermia Deaths of Children in
Vehicles |
|
|
Hyperthermia Deaths of Children in
Vehicles |
|
|
2. How accurate are statistics about the numbers of
deaths? How are the
statistics gathered?
1. How did
a meteorologist get involved in studying and tracking hyperthermia
deaths of children?
On July 24, 2001 a young father in San Jose, CA left his
5-month old son in the car on an 86 degree day while he visited friends.
Two hours later he came out and Kyle Patrick Gilbert was dead.
At that time I was asked by the media “how hot get in that car?”
and the only study I could find was from 1993 in Louisiana and only
looked at a single 93 degree day.
Out of scientific curiosity I started casually tracking
temperatures in my own vehicles and was startled at not only how hot the
readings were but also how rapidly they rose.
The following summer I a more controlled study and the project
grew from there. I began
working with some of the child car safety groups to share my data and
also link it to their case data.
About the same time I started working with two Stanford
University Hospital Emergency Medicine doctors who became my co-authors
for an article in the Pediatrics. Once it was published it became the
“go to” article on the topic and is used worldwide.
My hopes are that this research will raise the level of interest
and awareness about this sad topic and ultimately to save some innocent
lives.
2. How accurate are statistics about the numbers
of deaths? How are the
statistics gathered?
Sadly, the statistics are not nearly as accurate as we would
like. Periodically we become
aware of cases that somehow never caught the attention of local media,
happened in locales without electronic media or occasionally were
suppressed by the families or local authorities.
With the exception of a handful of cases we have learned about
through personal communications, the data is initially gathered with
online search tools such as Google News and Lexis-Nexus.
Sometimes if the information from these sources is insufficient
then the local authorities will be contacted.
Ideally the coding of deaths with ICD (International Coding of
Disease) codes would be accurate and have enough information to
delineate all cases of juvenile vehicular hyperthermia.
However, this is not the case and efforts to track hyperthermia
deaths of children in vehicles through death certificates miss perhaps
as many as a third of the cases.
3. Isn’t
there technology that will warn us if a child is left in a vehicle?
Yes, there are technological answers, from simple visual
reminders to
extremely complex technologies. I get a couple
inquiries a month from potential inventors/developers etc. who have
a "solution".
And there are actually already a couple devices on the market but
their market share and impact appears minimal at best. It’s my opinion that educating and raising awareness should be the primary solution to preventing hyperthermia deaths of children in vehicles. There is also the huge question whether technological answers, mandated or not, will leave out underserved populations with literally millions of used cars and used car seats in circulation. Very importantly the types of sensors/devices that I have seen proposed, would only only address about half of the cases. These are incidents where a child is accidently forgotten, but not cases where children gain access on their own or are intentionally left in vehicles. There's also the problem of getting devices to market, getting shelf space (or virtual shelf space for online sales) and even more importantly getting people to buy the device. Child safety experts tell me that the most common response from a parent is "I don't need one of those; I would never forget MY child!"
Consequently, the best use of my time and
resources is toward tracking the problem, educating about the scope of
the problem and raising the media’s and public's awareness of how often
this can happen and that it can happen to anyone.
4. How
are temperatures properly measured inside a vehicle?
The temperature inside a vehicle should be taken the same way
as it is outdoors; and that means NOT in direct sunlight.
When a thermometer is exposed to the sun you are then measuring
the energy of the sun and not the temperature of the air.
In the research associated with this study, the temperature
readings were taken with a thermometer suspended in free air (i.e., not
directly in contact with objects in the vehicle), at approximately the
same level as a car seat and out of direct sunlight.
Readings should also be taken with either a remote thermometer or
one that can be read without opening the vehicles doors.
5. How hot
do objects that are inside a car and in direct sunlight get?
While taking air temperature measurements I also regularly
used an infrared thermometer to measure the surface temperatures of
objects inside the vehicle.
On days when the ambient outside air temperature was in the 80’s it was
common to see the temperature of a dark dashboard or steering wheel to
be 180 to 200 degrees. Even
outside, the temperature of a black asphalt parking lot surface will
exceed 160 degrees.
6. How much
hotter does it get inside a trunk that inside the passenger compartment?
Surprisingly the inside of a trunk is cooler than the inside
of the car itself. This is
because most the heating occurs from objects being heated by sunlight
and those in turn heating the air.
Since no sunlight gets into the trunk the temperatures are
cooler. During my research I
anecdotally took some temperature reading inside the trunk on my test
vehicle and they were about 5-10 degrees cooler than the air in the
passenger compartment. Return to Hyperthermia Deaths of Children in Vehicles |
