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Children at risk as "button" battery use grows: study Posted 2012/05/14 at 11:24 pm EDT May 14, 2012 (Reuters) — Children face a growing risk from "button" batteries, according toa U.S. study showing a near doubling of emergency room visits inthe past two decades as the objects can cause electrical orchemical burns if swallowed. Most of those emergency room trips are due to coin-shaped batteriesthat have become ubiquitous in toys, remote controls and hearingaids and represent a shiny temptation to curious toddlers,according to a study in Pediatrics, the journal of the AmericanAcademy of Pediatrics. "Button" batteries carry extra risks, experts said, because theycan send an electrical current through esophageal tissue,eventually even burning a hole in the trachea or the esophagus -without children showing any signs of immediate injury. "If a child swallows a button battery, the parent might not see ithappen and the child might not have symptoms initially - and theclock is ticking," said Gary Smith, head of the Center for InjuryResearch and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus,Ohio, one of the authors of the study. "We've seen children in less than two hours have severe, severeinjuries from button batteries getting caught in the esophagus." Using a nationally-representative sample of about 100 U.S.hospitals with 24-hour emergency rooms, Smith and his colleaguescalculated that more than 65,000 children under age 18 had abattery-related emergency visit between 1990 and 2009. The rate of those injuries almost doubled during the study period,from about four children for every 100,000, to between seven andeight per 100,000. That's probably due to more and more household electronics, hearingaids and toys using button batteries, rather than the previouscylindrical batteries, with more than 80 percent of all emergencyroom visits involving button batteries. "They're shiny, they're small and children explore thingsdevelopmentally with their mouth - if they don't know whatsomething is, they put it in their mouth," said Nicholas Slamon, apediatrician who has treated battery-related injuries atNemours/Alfred I. DuPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington. There are a few ways button batteries can cause injury, he added.They can lodge or wedge in the esophagus and push on its walls, orthey can leak acid if the casing around the battery is eroded. But the most common fear is that they can create an electricalcurrent flowing through tissue, even if they don't have enoughjuice to power a remote control anymore. Slamon and colleagues see several children a year who needemergency surgery to retrieve a battery from the throat, nose orear. But only a small number of visits, about eight percent,require such serious intervention. Experts agreed that parents should make sure all compartments onbattery cases are screwed in or taped shut and dead batteriesshould be thrown into the bottom of the trash where children areunlikely to find them, Slamon added. "The real way to prevent these (emergencies) is to prevent theevent from happening in the first place," Smith said. "If (parents)suspect something, they need to get to the hospital and get anX-ray done immediately." SOURCE: bit.ly/jsoh2P (Reporting from New York by Genevra Pittman at Reuters Health;Editing by Elaine Lies and Ed Lane). I am an expert from industrialfurnaceparts.com, while we provides the quality product, such as Walking Beam Furnace Manufacturer , Bell Type Furnace, Mesh Belt Furnace,and more.
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