HOME ACCIDENTS AND THEIR PREVENTION
THE MODERN home is becoming one of the most dangerous spots
on earth because of technological advances which have paid little attention to
personal safety. So a recent study on home accidents, made for the World Health
Organization, concluded. The home is being turned, according to the study, into
a "complicated workshop filled with technically advanced machinery . . .
so complex as to be well beyond the understanding of the persons who have to
use it."
Electrical erasers, circular power saws and attachments, and can
openers are just a few examples of advances in electrical power use which
introduce increased hazards. "Machines for the pulping and shred- ding of
vegetables and mechanical vegetable peelers are presenting in- creasing hazards
to the family in the kitchen, and guarding them is frequently inadequate.
The cheaper and less well-designed spin dryers and power
wringers are also dangerous. It is relatively easy and cheap to construct
guards on all these machines and it will become increasingly necessary to
impose industrial safety standards on the manufacture of these implements-in
effect, make them foolproof." All of this may be true-and certainly there
is room for making all types of equipment safer, including many potentially
hazardous devices used in the home. But the fact is that the home long has been
a dangerous place.
Accidents rank fourth as a cause of death in this country.
More children, aged 1 to 14, die of accidents than of the next half-dozen
causes of death combined. Yearly, for persons of all ages, accidents in the
home cause more deaths than tuberculosis, diphtheria, polio, syphilis,
rheumatic fever, appendicitis, and homicide combined.
If the scores of thousands of deaths and millions of
injuries annually from highway accidents constitute a national catastrophe and
a scandal, so we think does the toll from accidents in the home. Medical
science has made great strides in conquering many diseases, but there has been
virtually no reduction in the death rate from accidents. But this has to be
added: No physician or safety expert or anybody else can do as much to prevent
accidents in the home as the parent aware of the threat they pose, of what the
specific hazards are, and of what measures, often quite simple, can be used to
reduce or remove the hazards.
