Life's Ups and Downs
By Hannah Isom
Who’d have thought that so many of life’s daily mundane activities could result in serious injury? If you thought about all of the horrific accidents you could meet with on an average day, you’d never get out of bed in the morning.Take for instance, the seemingly harmless procedure of riding in an elevator (or “lift” if you’re going to get all British about it). New evidence has emerged that taking the elevator caused around 30,000 injuries to children in the US between 1990 and 2004.
The results of the very first large-scale study evaluating elevator-related injuries showed that the under-twos accounted for a quarter of all such events, raising serious questions about the dangers of modern foot travel. It seems that the most common affliction among this age group was elevator doors closing on a body part (ouch), and that adults may be setting kiddies a bad example by trying to hold open elevator doors with an arm, a foot or some other appendage.
“What really surprised us was the number of infants with head injuries in our study”, said Joseph O’Neil, the lead author of the paper published in Clinical Pediatrics. He thinks that mothers may be to blame, not realising the dangers of getting their baby’s buggy caught in the closing jaws of the elevator. He even goes so far as to compare the preventable lift-associated trauma with drink driving, saying that “You can look at the environment and events before the incident and make changes to affect outcome.”
Adding further fuel to the fire is the growing phenomenon of “elevator-surfing”, in which unruly adolescents try to ride the lift on the outside, often with messy and even fatal consequences. The evidence all seems to point to what we’ve all known for a long time: that taking the stairs really is better for your health.
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And while you're here...
- Bizarre - Ring-pull injuries
- Weird - Menstruating makes you more injury prone
- Obvious - Drinkers take a tumble
- Straight - Preventing accidents: airbags
Image: Bill Davenport
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