Burn Rate in Kids Has Dropped, But Still Causes Concern

Oct. 7 -- TUESDAY, Oct. 6 (HealthDay News) -- After a long day last year, Danette McKinney asked her husband, Shawn, to check on the roast she had in the oven. As he opened the door, Shawn didn't see their 1-year-old daughter toddle up beside him. The little girl placed her palms on the scorching metal and shrieked.

"As we were taking her to the hospital, I think my husband and I were crying more than she was crying," said McKinney, a 30-year-old mother of two from Dublin, Ohio. "It was horrible."

Each year, more than 120,000 youths aged 20 and younger are treated in emergency rooms for burns, according to a study in the November issue of Pediatrics. Kids younger than 6 accounted for 56 percent of the injuries.

The number of pediatric burn victims actually has declined in recent years, falling 31 percent between 1990 and 2006. Researchers take the drop as a sign that safety messages about preventing burns are getting through to parents.

Yet they still consider the number of pediatric burns as too high. More than 2 million children and teens were treated for burns in emergency departments over the 17-year span of the study, the researchers found.

"The overall message is there is a lot more work to do," said study author Lara McKenzie, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Ohio State University and a researcher at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. "Burns can be very painful and devastating injuries, and the recovery period can be long and difficult."

Nearly 60 percent of burns are caused by thermal sources, such as flames or hot surfaces, according to the study, which used information from the Consumer Product Safety Commission's National Electronic Injury Surveillance System database. Scalds from hot liquid or steam were the second most common source of injury, particularly among young children. Other sources of burns included chemicals, radiation (sunburns) and electricity.

Boys accounted for nearly 59 percent of injuries. Burns most often occurred on a hand or finger (36 percent of the time) or on the head and face (21 percent), the study found.