Instead of celebrating the holiday, some children wind up in the emergency room with burn injuries.
Dr. Sophia Chaudhary of Emory Emergency Medicine told Channel 2’s Linda Stouffer that at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, teams are preparing for what they treat every Fourth of July: injuries from sparklers and fireworks.
“The most common types of burns that come in, typically the fingers in the hand, followed by burns to the face, the head and the ears. And then eye injuries, we also see fairly frequently,“ Chaudhary said.
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Last year, nationally, fireworks were connected to 14,700 injuries and 11 deaths. Burns account for 37% of the injuries.
”Burns to surface of the eye, to scratches on the eye, to broken bones around the eye, because somebody may be holding a firework and a blast, to internal eye trauma,“ Chaudhary said.
She says sparklers may seem harmless, but they burn hotter than many parents realize.
“All those sparklers are beautiful and spectacular that they actually can get to really high temperatures and get up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit,” Chaudhary said. “And if you think about that, on no other day in the year, are you going to hand your child a flaming candle? And so why would we do this on the Fourth?“
And for fireworks safety, leave it to the experts. Doctors say go to the professional and community fireworks shows, keep a safe distance of 500 feet and instead of sparklers, wave glow sticks or flags.
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