WASHINGTON — The nation’s pediatricians keep saying that television can be harmful for babies and toddlers, but this time, they mean it literally. A new study finds that in 2011 alone, televisions falling on children caused about 17,000 injuries that warranted a trip to a hospital in the United States.
And with television screens proliferating in U.S. households — more than half of U.S. homes have three or more TVs — the rate of such injuries is on the rise. Emergency-room visits related to toppled TVs have increased 95 per cent since 1990.
On average, a TV plummeting from an armoire, bureau or rickety shelf sends a child to a hospital emergency department every 30 minutes, says a new study in the journal Pediatrics. Almost two in three (64.3 per cent) of those injuries occurred in children younger than five, and boys accounted for a little more than 60 per cent of cases.
The most common TV-related injury was to a child’s head or neck, accounting for about 63 per cent of those seen in emergency rooms. Some 13.3 per cent of smaller children and 7.7 per cent of youths aged 11 to 17 sustained concussions from closed-head injuries. An additional 22 per cent of children had injuries to their legs.
The authors noted that TVs of all shapes, sizes and vintages were implicated in the injuries. But they noted that with old-fashioned cathode-ray tube TVs going the way of the eight-track tape, many families are stowing these behemoths on dressers and armoires in lesser-used rooms. The large sets could readily tip on little ones when they are out of sight of caregivers, they warned.
