Seatbelt Safety
Auto deaths are down in the US, and the injury rate for infants is down substantially. But there's some chilling news: children over age five are being injured more often than at any time in the last decade.
What's more, the lack of toddler seat standards and seatbelts themselves may be part of the problem.
All this week, CBS This Morning focuses on issues dealing with automobiles and automobile safety. In the first of a five-part series, parents are learning about the danger of air bags and are putting their kids in the back seat.
Certainly Anne McCracken, a Baltimore mom, got the message.
"I put my kids in the back seat always," McCracken says. "I assigned them to the windows where they had the lap and shoulder. I had my then one-and-a-half year old in the baby seat. I thought I was doing everything."
But one day, in one brief instant, Anne McCracken realized "safe" wasn't safe enough. Not for 6-year-old Jake.
"A young man in a pickup truck had a seizure and blacked out. And he came across the median strip and crashed into my car front on."
Little Jake's seat belt was riding too high on his stomach. It crushed his liver. He died of internal bleeding within 40 minutes.
Anne McCracken thought she was doing what every parent is told to do by safety capaigns.
Safety campaigns tell us to put our kids in the back, and that's where these kids are. But look how they're wearing their belts. Each child has his own style. Notice how the strap cuts across the neck. In a crash the impact wouldn't spread evenly along the belt as it's supposed to do.
The problem is that the belts are designed for adults, not kids, says Jim Hall, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board: "We have not used the technology, used what's available to see that it's done and done safely. For example, the government focuses on adults in crash tests. It has no child-sized dummy to determine how well children are protected."
That may explain why the injury rate among children aged five to nine has increased eight percent since 1988.
"This is the forgotten group, and yet these are the ones at greatest risk," says Doctor Ricardo Martinez, head of the National Transportation Safety Administration. He admits standard seatbelts put school-age children in a precarious position.
"For a lap belt to work properly, it has to fit on the bony surfaces of the body very snugly," Dr. Martinez says. "That is the collar bone, the sternum, the tight, bony portions of the hips. For a child, they're not quite ready to accept those loads. So they may need to have a booster seat which pulls them up and allows an adult lap shoulder belt to fit them properly."
Martinez has some surprising information for most parents: they should keep their children in booster seats until they are about 80 pounds or eight years old. But his agency has never set standards for th larger seats.
Despite all the problems, all of the experts agree that a child in a seat belt is safer than one who is not. Even Anne McCracken, who lost her six year-old son, agrees: "My surviving daughter is proof positive of how seat belts in car seats, when they work, they work well."
You Are What You Drive