A child is treated every 6 minutes in the US

For weeks after the accident, Candice Johnson couldn’t sleep. Over and over, she kept reliving the moment last October when she dropped her 9-month-old daughter down a flight of stairs in their Pennsylvania home. “I kept seeing us falling,” she said. “I was carrying her down the steps and my flip-flop broke.”  Johnson slipped and Annika flew out of her mother’s arms, striking her head. Doctors at a trauma center diagnosed a skull fracture and bleeding on her brain. Five months later, the child has recovered, but for Johnson, taking the stairs will never be the same.“It was an accident, but it’s hard,” said Johnson, 34, of Sinking Spring, Pa. “You can’t help but blaming yourself.” That may be true, but there’s plenty of blame to go around. New research shows that a child younger than 5 is treated for a stair-related injury every six minutes in a U.S. emergency department, on average, and being carried on the stairs accounts for nearly a quarter of stair injuries in children younger than 1.We were surprised by the numbers,” said Dr. Gary A. Smith, director of the center for injury research and policy for Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. “It sends a wake-up call to all of us.” In the first nationally representative study of stair injuries in young kids, Smith and his colleagues found that nearly 932,000 children younger than 5 were hurt in stair accidents in the U.S. in the decade from 1999 through 2008. On average, that’s more than 93,000 kids a year, or about 46.5 injuries for every 10,000 children under age 5, according to the study published in the journal Pediatrics. The good news is, the number of injuries each year fell during that period, dropping by 11.6 percent by 2008, mostly because of a sharp decline in stair injuries tied to baby walkers, which once hurt some 25,000 children a year. Voluntary safety standards enacted in the mid-1990s and wider awareness about the dangers of baby walkers helped fuel that decline, cutting those injuries to about 1,300 a year, Smith said.But the bad news is, nearly 90,000 kids still were hurt in stair accidents in 2008, largely because of preventable factors linked to stairway design, consumer awareness and parental education. 'Incredibly awful' Kate Canterbury, 36, of Columbia, Mo., blames the steep stairs in a three-story condo in St. Paul, Minn., for her tumble three years ago while carrying her twin daughters, Evie and Jane, who were then 18 months old. "It was incredibly awful because I knew in that split second that I had to let one go or all of us would fall," Canterbury recalled. It wasn't a matter of choice, but momentum. She dropped the twin in her left arm, which was pointing downstairs. The toddler fell while Canterbury and the other twin slid down the steps.