Third Degree Burns

Published on: May 17, 2011

With Children, the Risk of Severe Burns is Much Higher

With the way that small children manage to get into everything, adults must be extra vigilant and careful when it comes to both fire safety and burn safety when kids are present.

Two stories from this past week make this point very clearly. First, in northwest Florida, Meigs County police say that a mom named Teresa Reed is in stable condition at the Joseph Still Burn Center in Augusta–but is very lucky to be alive.

Officers say a fire broke out around ten o’clock at night on May 11 in Reed’s apartment, and that it was started when Reed’s five-year-old son fell asleep after playing with matches.

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Published on: May 5, 2011

A Story of Hope for a Burn Victim, and a Lesson from Another Work Accident

By Larry Kramer

In a blog post on April 26, we wrote about young kids from other countries who were getting life-altering surgery here in the United States to save them from a life of pain and disfigurement from severe burns.

Well, here is another such example, which is good news for a young victim of third-degree burns who lives in Congo. In Boston this week, a badly burned Congolese boy is recovering from reconstructive surgery at Shriners Hospital, and his expected quality of life is much better than it was before the surgery.

Unfortunately, he was playing hide-and-seek on the grounds of a power substation back home in Congo, and 9-year-old Yusuf Badibanga was nearly killed because of it. He came in contact with some of the equipment and suffered an enormous electric shock, and was badly burned to the point of severe disfigurement.

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Published on: May 3, 2011

Carelessness With Fire That Can Cause Third-Degree Burns

By Larry Kramer

In a town called Granby in upstate New York, a man was seriously burned last week when he simply placed meat carelessly into a hot pan.

Granby Center Fire Chief Donald LaBarge said the man was cooking inside his mobile home when he tossed more meat into the pan. Flames from splattering grease came back at him, causing second- and third-degree burns to the man’s face, hands, arms and back.

The man was taken to a Syracuse hospital by ambulance. Damage to the mobile home was limited to the area around the stove, so it was not even a true fire. Instead, if the man was simply more careful about placing his food into a hot pan, this incident would not have happened.

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Published on: April 28, 2011

Overlooked Fire Hazards in the Home Can Be Deadly

By Larry Kramer

Here are two stories from this past week that should provide lessons about paying close attention to anything around the home that can cause a fire, or which can make your escape from a fire more difficult

First: On April 20, the Consumer Product Safety Commission ordered the recall of more than 7 million candles because of concerns the plastic cup that holds the candle could melt or catch fire.

The “tea lights” were sold under the brand names of Chesapeake Bay Candle and Modern Light. They were sold at stores such as Home Goods, Target, Wegmans and others nationwide between July 2009 and February 2011.

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Published on: April 26, 2011

Burn Survivor Stories: Children Getting Another Chance at Life

By Larry Kramer

This month, a young Iraqi boy disfigured by a car bomb in Iraq came to Long Island, NY for surgery that could give him a chance at a normal life. Zeenabdeen Hadi, now four years old, was barely a year old when the blast burned part of his face down to the bone.

The Global Medical Relief Fund helped bring the boy and his uncle to the United States. The two are staying at Ronald McDonald House in New Hyde Park, NY and are expected to be there for several months. In addition to reconstructive surgery, doctors want to close a wound in Zeenabdeen’s forehead that could lead to a brain infection.

This is not the first time that young victims of severe burns in Iraq have been brought to the U.S. for life-altering and even life-saving treatment of injuries resulting from third-degree burns. In 2007, a six-year-old Iraqi boy, who was horribly scarred after he was set on fire by insurgents outside Baghdad, underwent surgery in Los Angeles to repair his badly burned face. The boy, known only as Youssif, will need almost a year and several more surgeries to recover. The American public responded generously to his needs, donating $300,000.

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Published on: April 21, 2011

Severe Burns and Smoke Inhalation From Sources You Can’t Control

By Larry Kramer

The CBS television station in Keller, Texas reported last week on this story of severe burns on one family’s child and several other children, all of whom are in a special-needs class at their school:

Nicholas Chaney’s parents trusted that he’s taken care of at school just like he is at home. Nicholas, 18, has cerebral palsy. “I admire the teachers they do a very good job with them,” says his mother Pauline Chaney.

But now that trust is shaken. “As I got closer, he smelled like burned hair and burned skin,” says Nicholas’ stepfather, Rudy Moreno. Moreno says that his stepson’s special needs class at Keller High School went outside at the same time other students were using charcoal grills as part of a cooking class.

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Published on: April 19, 2011

Measuring Severe Burn Rates for Surfaces Found at Home and Work

By Larry Kramer

An interesting, though very academic, paper was published recently about the ways that investigators can measure how quickly skin can receive painful second-degree burns as well as far more damaging third-degree burns from coming in contact different surfaces. At the top of the list of fast skin-burning surfaces was aluminum, then steel, then brass, and then concrete (which most people might not have thought of). Actually, make sure you keep that last one in mind come the summertime, when people walk around outside in bare feet more often, and children play outside more often on such a surface.

Anyway, the research paper talked about a tool called a thermesthesiometer, which can be placed against the top or side of different appliances and other objects to see how quickly skin can burn on that surface. This is a test that a personal-injury attorney could ask for if a client received third-degree burns and wanted to investigate if another party was liable for the subsequent burn injury the victim received.

On a larger scale, it is critical that people know which surfaces in their homes, work sites, and other places can get hot and burn the epidermis, or outer layer of skin. Why? Because the epidermis is just .08 of a millimeter thick, so it can be burned away in just a few seconds on the types of surfaces listed above. And once that outer layer is burned away, you reach the dermis–the layer that holds the blood vessels and nerve endings. When the epidermis is burned away to the point that the dermis gets damaged, that is the classic definition of a third-degree burn.

Published on: April 7, 2011

A Hot Debate About Fire Sprinklers in Homes and Condos

By Larry Kramer

An article written for the Associated Press this past week covered a topic that every head of a household should know something about: A regulation calling for homes built after January 1, 2011 to install fire sprinklers.

This rule in some areas has ignited a fight around the country between fire safety officials, who say home fire sprinklers save lives, and home builders who are struggling to recover from the real-estate crash. Many of the builders contend that sprinkler installations should be voluntary, meaning it’s up to the home buyer.

The International Code Council, an organization of building inspectors, fire officials and others who set building standards, recommended in 2009 that states and municipalities adopt codes requiring sprinkler systems in homes and town houses less than three stories high. These regulations took effect this past January.

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Published on: April 5, 2011

Real-World Lessons for Preventing Home Fires, Severe Burns, and Smoke Inhalation

By Larry Kramer

Here are three items that were in the news last week that provide good lessons for anyone–but especially families–as they examine their home for fire hazards, and also to make sure their fire-escape plans are known by everyone in the family.

First, New York city fire officials say a lumbering pet turtle sparked a fast-moving fire in a a Brooklyn apartment after crawling out of its tank and knocking over the terrarium’s heat lamp.

The six-year-old African tortoise, about the size of a basketball, survived. But officials say one firefighter and three police officers suffered smoke inhalation. The reptile was housed in their owner’s bedroom, an eighteen-year-old who was not home at the time, nor was his family.

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Published on: March 31, 2011

Alarming News About the Effectiveness of Smoke Detectors

By Larry Kramer

Researchers at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia conducted a study among school-age children to see how effective a smoke detector was in waking them up in the event of fire. Unfortunately, the results were frightening, and a serious wake-up call for parents, firefighters, and to fire-safety educators alike.

The study, whose results were publicized recently in the industry journal Fire and Materials, asked the parents in 80 families to activate the smoke detector in their home after their children had been asleep between one and three hours. The 123 children who were in the study were divided into two groups, based on which children had reached puberty and which did not. The reason for this: Levels of the hormone melatonin, which helps induce sleep, go down once children reach puberty. So it would seem that younger children would be deeper into sleep, and perhaps less likely to be awakened by an alarm.

That proved to be true–but it did not mean that most of the older children heard the alarm, either. In fact,, 78 percent of all the kids that were studied slept through a smoke detector’s alarm that was blaring for at least 30 seconds. What’s more, parents reported that of the 22 percent of children who did wake up, only half of them identified the noise as a smoke detector, and just one-fourth of them even knew that a smoke detector’s noise means to get out of the house immediately. And while the younger kids were likeliest to sleep through the alarm (87 percent of them!), 56 percent of the 11- to 15-year-olds also slept through the piercing noise.

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