Posted on 11/07/2020 4:26:05 AM PST by marktwain
On 26 July 2020, a paper titled: Glass table injuries: A silent public health problem was published in the American Journal of Surgery.
The paper detailed an examination of how many accidents involving glass tables occurred in the United States, how severe the injuries from such accidents were, and the distribution of injuries by age. The annual number of fatalities from accidents involving glass tables was projected to be about 400.
Most people do not consider glass tables to be a significant risk for accidents. 400 deaths a year sounds like a lot. It is about .13 per 100,000, out of a total of 731.9 per 100,000 total. 400 is .00018 of the total number of deaths in the nation each year.
The results of the article have been widely published in the public media. From newsmax.com:
Bonne's group found more than 3,200 U.S. cases of glass table-related injuries requiring trauma center care occurring between 2009 and 2015. The data was collected from the 96 sample hospitals included in the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System database. More than half of the injuries were traced to faulty glass tables, the researchers noted.
Multiplying that by the almost 5,000 emergency care centers nationwide, Bonne's team estimated there are about 13,800 U.S. cases of severe injury tied to glass tables each year.
The team also looked more closely at the 24 cases that their Level 1 trauma center treated between 2001 and 2016. In this smaller grouping, the investigators found that half of their patients experienced injuries to their deep organs, upper torso, abdomen or joint cavities and required surgery. About 8% died within a month of injury. Most of the injuries were suffered by children younger than age 7 or adults in their early 20s.
(Excerpt) Read more at ammoland.com ...
This is a good one. Swimming pools are another, but this is probably better.
Pillows kill people. Look what happened to Scalia. Riiight.
If this data was gathered from electronic health records, who knows how many diagnoses were correct and how many were harried docs giving up trying to find an accurate option from the pick list, and just putting in something ALMOST right so they could get on to the next patient.
I have been there, and I think medical science has been deeply compromised by EHRs.
We were buying a living room set with matching coffee table having a glass top. Told them the glass top would not work because we had an infant daughter. They switched it to solid wood. While I had not heard of issues with with children and glass tops I just knew she would crawl on top of the table.
And of course, the danger can be removed by “appropriate legislation.”
We had a patio table with a glass top. One hot day it just shattered. Fortunately no one was near it. When we first bought it I wondered about the safety, now with that experience it’s really a foolish and dangerous buy.
Like yours, all table tops are now required by law to be tempered and break into small shards that are not able to cut you. I think the childs deat with a table top would be the result of impact rather than cutting and bleeding.
My analysis of your tabletop shattering was probably the result of a scratch in the surface. At sometime after the scratch there was a temperature change that induced surface stress causing the glass to shatter beginning at the scratch.
Very interesting. The authors of the tabletop paper seem unaware of such a law.
Do you know where it might be found?
The authors of the paper say the deaths are primarily from cutting and penetration injuries, not blunt trauma.
In the paper, many of the injuries are said to have occurred with children jumping from other furniture onto the tabletop.
Tempered glass can also break into long, thin shards. It’s not like glass that is also laminated. And fairly large pieces of tempered glass, although cracked throughout, can remain in a frame. The edges of such a piece can cut someone in an accident.
When glass tabletops are outlawed, only outlaws will have glass tabletops.
Don’t forget swimming pools and kids.
Tempered glass DOES NOT break into long shards, it breaks into small nugget like pieces,the very quality that that made it mandated as safety glass. Goes back to the first Consumer Products Safety Commission regulations (circa early 70s).
Auto glass consists of two layers of tempered glass bonded to a plastic film core to reduce projectile effects.
Tempered glass will do that. Not particularly dangerous, but certainly messy.
Time for Federal Registration of glass table tops, it’s for the children after all.........
And a ten day waiting period.
The total accidental deaths of children (unintended deaths) from 1999 to 2017 were 135,259. Fatal firearms accidents were 1.47 percent of the total. Many other circumstances accounted for much higher numbers of unintentional deaths than those occurring with firearms. Here are numbers from the CDC database for the same period, 1999-2017, for children aged 0 – 17.
Considering the source, medical personnel, it's highly unlikely thatvthey bothered to check:
· Consumer Products Safety Commission Regulations...along with the lengthy data which formed the basis for the rules.
Among the statistics of glass door "accident injuries" the preponderance were due to staggering drunks. The published nationwide statistics regarding Florida or glass jalousie door slats found only two incidents involving injuries; 1 drunk, and one small child who only required a few stiches in her hand. Nonetheless, the glass had to be changed to fully tempered or laminated safety glass.
One has to drill through the details to find the bureaucratic devils hidden there.
THX
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