A new report from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention showed that all-terrain (ATV) related injuries among children and teens had dropped significantly from 2004.
Ruth Shults, senior epidemiologist in the Division of Unintentional Injury Prevention in the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control in Atlanta, and her colleagues studied the emergency records from 66 hospitals across the nation.
There were 5,500 ATV-related injuries involving children 15 years old and below declared between 2001 and 2010.
They noticed that between 2001 and 2004, there was an increase on the injuries from 50 for every 100,000 children in 2001 to 67 in 2004. After 2004, the trend went down to 42 for every 100,000 through 2010.
67 percent of the injuries occurred on male riders. Fractures were the most common cause of the injuries wherein 31 percent was focused on the head.
So what caused the decline? Shults associated the downturn to economic recession. Few children were riding ATVs and few people were purchasing too.
"Our best guess is that much of the decline in ATV injuries among younger riders is related to the recession," Shults told MedPage Today.
A recommendation to prohibit ATV use among those below 16 years old was made by the American Academy of Pediatrics after reading the report.
"I think one of the big problems… is that the adult-sized ATV is often what kids are driving and it's not made for their size to maneuver and it's so heavy that if it lands on them it can be life-threatening," Dr. Allison McBride, a pediatric emergency medicine doctor from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, told Reuters Health. She wasn’t involved in the study.
Meanwhile, the Consumer Product Safety Commission implied that children may still use the ATVs, although it was designed for adult use, as long as they wear protection such as helmets and other safety gears since these vehicles have the tendency to roll over. They may also attend a training course to learn ATV driving.
The study was published on the July 1 issue of online journal Pediatrics.
