Now that summer’s heat is here, it feels like a good time to remember that leaving your child (or pet) in the car can be deadly (not that you should ever be doing this anyway).
In the U.S., 9 children have died this year already because of heat stroke. These figures come from The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. NINE KIDS! That’s crazy sad to me.
MyChamplainValley.com posted a short news story about this and interviewed David Grass, the Environmental Health Surveillance Chief of the Vermont Department of Health. He had this to say about leaving your kid in the car:
It’s particularly dangerous because the internal temperature of a car [can] increase as many as 20 degrees in 10 minutes. So it can really take minutes for conditions where heat stroke can occur.
When in temperature inside a car reaches 87 degrees, you are 8 times more likely to go to the emergency room because of a heat related illness.