That was the title of
an article that appeared on the USA
Today website on May 8, 2017. It came from
a press release titled
Study: Cotton
Tip Applicators Injure Children at Surprising Rate which said:
“Doctors
have warned that using cotton tip applicators to clean your ears can lead to
injury and infection, but a new study shows that a startling number of children
suffer injuries after cotton tip applicators are inserted into their ears. The
study by researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital found that more than a
quarter of a million children were treated in U.S. emergency departments from
1990-2010 for cotton tip applicator-related ear injuries, that’s about 34
children every day.
‘Far
too many children and parents believe that the ears should be cleaned at home,
and that a cotton tip applicator is the tool to do that,’ said Kris Jatana,
M.D., a pediatric otolaryngologist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and lead
author of the study. ‘And because this study only captured injuries that were
treated in emergency departments, there were likely a lot more injuries to
children who were treated by an ear, nose and throat specialist or a
pediatrician.’
Of
the children treated in emergency departments, more than two-thirds were under
the age of eight, and 77 percent of patients were handling the cotton tip
applicators themselves. Dr. Jatana says these products should be kept out of
the reach of young children, and it’s important for parents to teach older
children that cotton tip applicators should never be used in their ears.
‘The
ear canals are self-cleaning, so not only is it unnecessary to clean children’s
ear canals, but it puts them at serious risk of injury,’ said Dr. Jatana. ‘Cotton
tip applicators can easily cause a perforation or hole in the eardrum or push
wax deeper into the ear canal where it gets trapped. Injuries can cause
infection, dizziness or irreversible hearing loss.’ ”
How could most injuries be prevented? Take those swabs away
from children. Tell them if they want to get water out of their ears after a
shower or bath, then they should just jump up and down. They’ll probably
instead roll up a facial tissue, but won’t be able to push it hard enough to
perforate an eardrum.
Where are the detailed results from that study? In
an
article that will appear in
The Journal of Pediatrics by Zeenath S. Ameen,
Thiphalak Chounthiarth, Gary A. Smith, and Kris R. Jatana titled
Pediatric
Cotton-Tip Applicator-Related Ear Injury Treated in United States Emergency
Departments, 1990-2010.
What is missing from that press release and article? A
context for that 34-a-day number. Where does it fit in a bigger picture
compared with other injuries?
For example, how does it compare with skateboarding? I found
an article from April 8, 2016 at LiveScience by Sara G. Miller titled
Not So
Gnarly: Skateboarding Sends 176 Kids to the ER Every Day. That’s five times the
number of cotton swab injuries. It reported on results from a 2016 magazine
article in
Injury Epidemiology by Lara B. McKenzie, E. Fletcher, N.G. Nelson,
K. J. Roberts, and E. G. Klein titled
Epidemiology of skateboarding-related
injuries sustained by children and adolescents 5-19 years of age and treated in
US emergency departments: 1990 to 2008. You can read the abstract
here at
PubMed. Curiously McKenzie, Nelson, and Roberts are with the
Center for Injury
Research and Policy in The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s
Hospital, as are Ameen, Chounthiarth and Smith – the first three authors of the
article on cotton swabs.
How about other sports? I found a July 2016
report
(Statistical Brief #207) by Audrey J. Weiss and Ann Eixhauser titled
Sports-Related
Emergency Department Visits and Hospital Inpatient Stays, 2013. It came from
the
Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP). Table 2 listed the Top Five
specific sports activities associated with emergency room visits (discharged)
for both boys (2789 per day) and girls (1415 per day), and the overall total
(4204). As shown above, for boys there were 458 injuries associated with
American tackle football, followed by 379 for other unspecified sports
activity, and 329 for bicycle riding. For girls there were 181 for school
recess and summer camp, 139 for bicycle riding, and 132 for other unspecified
sports activity. Running (111) and soccer (110) were almost the same and both
more than 3 times that for cotton swabs.
Table 1 listed the Top Ten specific sports activities
associated with emergency room visits (discharged) for both children and adults.
I have plotted them in the bar chart shown above, along with the cotton swab
and skateboarding injuries. There were almost exactly twice as many (353 per
day) soccer injuries as skateboarding injuries, but that was minor compared
with the largest category - 1051 bicycle riding injuries. There were a total of
7,688 sports-related Emergency Department visits per day.
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