Children are still dying in hot cars.
Despite the efforts of child advocates and U.S. highway safety officials, Americans keep leaving young children in hot vehicles. In the first week of August, eight children across the U.S. died from heatstroke in hot vehicles — believed to be the most ever in a single week.
This year, 23 children have died of hyperthermia in cars in 13 states, the advocacy group Safe Kids Worldwide says. There were 33 such deaths in all of 2011 and 49 in 2010, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reports.
“Never leave your child alone unattended, not even for a minute,” says Kate Carr, president and CEO of Safe Kids Worldwide, a network of organizations dedicated to protecting children from injuries.
The eight deaths from Aug. 1-7 are believed to be the highest one-week total ever, NHTSA Administrator David Strickland says.
Heatstroke is the leading cause of non-crash vehicle-related deaths for children under age 14, according to NHTSA.
San Francisco State University researcher Jan Null found that from 1998 to Monday, 550 children died when left unattended in hot cars. Null says children have died in a wide range of outdoor temperatures — from a death in 2009 in El Cerrito, Calif., (67 degrees Fahrenheit) to a death July 9 in Mesa, Ariz., (113 degrees Fahrenheit).
The bodies of infants and children heat up three to five times faster than those of adults, says Leticia Ryan, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington.
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