Child Injuries From Strollers and Shopping Carts
In our mobile society, adults must transport small children for recreation as well activities of daily living. The common modes for transporting children, strollers and shopping carts, can cause great injury to children if they are defective.
Strollers
Strollers are used to transport children both outdoors and indoors, on recreational visits to parks and zoos as well as for shopping errands. Strollers vary in design and cost, ranging from an inexpensive $20 to many hundreds of dollars. Most U.S. families with young children own a stroller.
Each year, over 13,000 children are injured in stroller accidents. A report of the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System of the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission revealed that in one four-year period, over 64,000 children under three-years old were injured in stroller-related accidents. Almost one-quarter of these injuries involved closed-head and extremity fractures; 70% of these children were admitted to hospitals for head trauma.
Designed to keep children safe while mobile, strollers incorporate restraint systems and wheels that turn easily when met with obstructions on the ground. When traveling quickly over hard outdoor or indoor flooring surfaces, however, a child may be propelled out of the stroller if the safety straps fail. Also, because strollers are also built to break down easily, metal parts can be exposed to children's arms legs, and fingers, and children can be seriously injured.
Manufacturers were recently forced to recall over a million defective strollers for serious hinge injuries. In these cases, small children suffered fingertip amputations as a result of their fingers being caught into the side hinges of a stroller.
Shopping carts
Shopping cart–related injuries to children are also common and can result in severe injury or even death. In 75% of occurrences a shopping cart falls or tips over, resulting in serious injuries to a child’s head and neck. Annually, approximately 24,000 children under one-year old are treated in hospital emergency departments for shopping cart injuries, with over 650 children a year requiring hospital admission.
Because of the current variability of shopping cart design and stability and because most parents are not able to ascertain the relative safety of a cart by visual inspection, adults should carefully consider the potential for injury before transporting children in shopping carts. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recently noted that the current U.S. safety standards for shopping carts fail to provide "clear and effective performance criteria" for child-restraint systems and cart stability to prevent falls and injuries resulting from cart tip-overs.
Adults should consider alternatives to transporting their child in a shopping cart until an effective revised performance standard for shopping cart safety is implemented in the United States. When transporting children in shopping carts, adults should employ safety strategies to help prevent shopping cart–related injuries. Children should always be restrained, should never be left unattended in a shopping cart, and should neither be permitted to stand up in a cart, ride in the basket or ride on the outside of a shopping cart.
Las Vegas Product Liability Lawyers
If your child has been seriously or fatally injured in an accident involving a defective stroller or shopping cart, the manufacturer may be liable for damages for failure to warn of defects or to recall the defective and dangerous stroller or cart. Contact the Oronoz Ericsson to seek counsel and for the compensation to which you and your family are entitled for your child’s injury and tragic loss.
