For many families, the holiday season is a time of giving gifts. Children routinely receive lots of toys this time of year from immediate family, friends and relatives. While many of these toys are perfectly safe and will provide children with hours of entertainment, the sad reality is that some of the toys can cause very serious child injuries or even fatalities.
Defective toys make it to the marketplace every year despite the best efforts of agencies like the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). When these toys end up being sold, the manufacturers have an obligation to recall them as soon as problems become known. This does not always happen in a timely manner, and kids could get hurt before a recall is instituted. Parents may also be unaware when a toy is recalled, especially if the toy was received as a gift.
Routinely checking the Consumer Product Safety Commission recall list for dangerous toys is one way that parents can try to protect their children, but the bottom line is that it is companies who have the responsibility of ensuring safety. If a toy cause a child to suffer injury, his family should consult with a Charleston defective products lawyer for help pursuing a damage claim.
Dangerous Toys Could Lead to Child Injuries Over the Holidays
According to ABC News, one recent study indicates that the number of toy-related injuries affecting children has increased in recent decades. In 1990, 18.9 out of every 10,000 children experienced an injury rate due to toys. By 2011, the number had risen to 26.9 out of 10,000 children. While 121,249 kids visited emergency rooms due to toy-related injuries in 1990, there were an estimated 195,363 R visits in 2011. Falls were the most common reason for kids to seek medical attention after being hurt while using a toy.
One toy in particularly was largely responsible for causing this significant increase in child injuries: electric scooters or kick scooters. These toys are responsible for around 40 percent of the increase in child injury rates.
These toys are also not counted as a “toy” for purposes of statistics published by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). The omission of scooters helps to explain why the CPSC published a 2013 report indicating that the number of toy-related injuries has remained relatively steady in recent years. Leaving these scooters out paints an incomplete picture of the true number of child injuries related to toys that occur each year.
Even without the CPSC including scooters, the agency’s data shows a significant risk to kids from dangerous toys. In 2013, for example, a total of nine children lost their lives in toy-related incidents. Around 256,700 children went to the ER with injuries from toys, and around 44 percent of the injuries were to the head or the face.
Numerous efforts have been made to reduce these troubling statistics, and the CPSC has announced that it has worked with U.S. customs to ensure that only toys tested to be safe are imported. Despite these attempts, however, kids remain at risk. Manufacturers need to do a better job of providing adequate warning of dangers and keeping unsafe products off the shelves- and they need to be held accountable with the help of an injury lawyer when they let customers down.