Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com
Published - Saturday, July 05, 2008
Local doctors urge caution with Fourth fireworks
La Crosse-area emergency medicine physicians see occasional fireworks injuries this time of the year.
But the ones they see can be bad.
“Many years ago, I had someone making their own fireworks and it blew off part of a hand,” said Dr. Jeffery Hillesland, a Gundersen Lutheran physician specializing in emergency medicine.
“We don’t see it a lot, but every year we have a couple injuries come through the ER,” he said.
In La Crosse, physicians most often see face and hand injuries among children, often resulting from poor supervision by adults.
Hillesland said he sees burns to eyes and hands from sparklers, which can burn at more than 1,000 degrees F.
“Burns from sparklers are the biggest thing we see,” he said. “Sparklers are intensely dangerous.”
He said he has seen patients with ruptured ear drums from illegal firecrackers and loss of fingers when a device goes off in the hand.
Dr. Robert Johnson, an emergency medicine physician at Franciscan Skemp, said he has seen children 12 and younger with sparkler burns and older children with injuries resulting from misuse of firecrackers. “A sparkler is a fire pole in your hands,” Johnson said. “Kids are out in the dark and can’t see their buddy next to them and someone gets burned.
“People also get into trouble when they don’t know what type of fireworks they’ve got and what they do,” he said.
Reading instructions on fireworks can help prevent injuries, he said. One patient thought the fireworks was only going to make noise, but instead it shot fire balls into the person’s face, Johnson said.
Children younger than 14 should be supervised when using fireworks, he said.
Nationally, the number of fireworks injuries dropped by 15 percent between 2005 and 2006. But still 9,200 people were treated for fireworks-related injuries in emergency departments in 2006, according to the American College of Emergency Physicians.
According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, seven out of every 100 people injured from fireworks have to be hospitalized.
The estimated annual cost of fireworks-related injuries in the U.S. is $100 million.
Fireworks also cause more than 1,000 residential fires each year.
Terry Rindfleisch can be reached at trindfleisch@lacrossetribune.com, or (608) 791-8227
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