Burns

July 18, 2010

Posted in Food & Water Precautions, Outdoor Recreation, Prevention No Comments »
Tags: barbecues, burns, campfire safety, campfires, campgrounds, children, circle of safety, coals, cooking grills, cookout-related burns, cookouts, grills, kids, kids campfire, Kids Travel Doc, kids travel doctor, marshmellows

To prevent children from being burned at cookouts, establish a “circle of safety” or a “forbidden zone” around cooking grills and campfires. Draw the line in the ground (literally, if possible) or delineate the area in some other way.

Even though such burns are preventable with reasonable precautions, each year more than 3,000 American children experience cookout-related burns sufficiently severe to require emergency room treatment. Most of these children are under five years of age. The most common scenario is a child coming into contact with coals or grills after the cooking phase of the cookout is over. Likely, adults are less vigilant in keeping children away, not realizing that grills and campfires remain hot for hours. In campfire-related burns, 70 percent occur from contact with embers, not with flames. Burns also occur when children accidentally bump into or fall against hot items while playing, small children walk barefooted or crawl onto coals, and older children participate in lighting fires.

In an Australian study, many campfire-associated burns occur the day after a campfire is in use. Eight hours after a cookout, coals are still sufficiently hot to cause severe full skin thickness burns after one second of contact. Sixteen hours after the cookout, the core temperature of the campfire is still greater than 250 degrees F.

Campfires should be doused, preferably with water. Sand and dirt are adequate in preventing fires from spreading but may help coals retain heat, and worse, conceal the coals.

Keep kids at a distance from your cookout, but don’t let them wander far. In campgrounds and at tailgate parties, more often than not, other cookouts are going on nearby, or have been only recently abandoned.

And be vigilant at marshmallow roasts. Kids place marshmallows at one end of a stick, hold the other end, and dangle the marshmallow over the fire. The longer the stick the better; it places kids further from the fire. And the fewer kids roasting at a time, the smaller is the chance of kids poking one another with the sticks.

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Dr. Neumann’s Health Alert: Kids/Cookouts/Burns

July 18, 2010

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