StemCell Therapy

The temperature reached 90 degrees in Harrah, Oklahoma, on a June day two years ago when 50-year-old Alanna Jean Orr went into the Kickapoo Casino in what turned out to be a gamble with the life of her 5-year-old grandson.

She'd left him locked in her car parked under the glaring sun and fed the slot machines for six hours. When she finally did return, the grandson, Maddox Ryan Durbin, was dead. His grandmother was soon the defendant in a federal felony murder case.

Orr pleaded guilty and was sentenced last month to 17 years in prison.

It sometimes happens that way that kids perish in steaming hot cars, where interior temperature can become deadly within 10 minutes because they're deliberately left alone while a parent or caregiver does something else.

But not most of the time.

Most of the time, parents accidentally kill their babies in a tragic collision of tightly packed schedules, changed routines and lack of sleep. Their parents simply forget they were in the back seat a phenomenon that, unfathomable as it may seem, is backed by real science.

Since 1998, 54 percent of the 853 pediatric hot car deaths were accidental, according to federal safety statistics. Another 25 percent of the kids who died managed to lock themselves in cars when their parents turned their backs. People who intentionally left children in cars, as Orr in Oklahoma did two years ago, represent 19 percent of cases.

But something different is happening this year, and it could be an "unintended consequence" of coronavirus stay-at-home orders, says Jan Null, a San Jose State University research meteorologist and adjunct professor.

That unintended consequence is relatively good news: Usually, this time of year, nearly 20 kids would have died from being left in hot cars.

This year, the number is six.

Null who keeps a running registry of pediatric vehicular heatstroke deaths on his website, noheatstroke.org, also has a warning: As more people return to work with disrupted schedules, that number could spike.

"It's hard to prove a negative," Null says, but the supposition among agencies and organizations working to stem hot car deaths is that people are staying home more and haven't made the abrupt routine changes that can lead to what's been described as "forgotten baby syndrome."

Six kids have died of vehicular heatstroke this year; last year at this time, three times as many kids had died in hot cars.

"Usually, there would be eight to 10 by June 15," says Janette Fennell, a Philadelphia woman who founded and heads Kids and Cars, an advocacy group leading the call for automakers to install smart technology to alert drivers of passengers left in vehicles.

An average of 39 kids a year die in hot cars but 2019 and 2018 were record years with 53 and 54 hot car deaths, respectively.

In three of the hot car deaths this year, including a double fatality in Oklahoma, children locked themselves in cars during play, a circumstance Null says warrants more focus by child safety advocates given the number who perish in that way in a typical year.

Null worries that could happen more during the pandemic as parents do their jobs from home, juggling their professional responsibilities with teaching at home during the regular school year and, now that kids are on summer break, trying to find child care. That increases the imperative to make sure cars are locked and key fobs are tucked safely out of kids' reach.

"Teach them cars are not playhouses," he says. "If a child is missing, check the pool first, but next check all the cars, including trunks and foot well areas, places they can die in a short time. If they're hiding in the back yard or a closet, they're in trouble, but they're not dead."

The other three hot car deaths in 2020 appear to involve children who were accidentally forgotten, according to news reports.

Their parents forgot them?

How is that possible?

In many cases, a parent completely loses awareness that the child is in the car, according to David Diamond, professor of psychology, molecular pharmacology and physiology at the University of South Florida, who has studied the hot car death phenomenon for 15 years.

His research shows parents can forget their kids are in the car as a result of competition among the brain's memory systems.

"Memory is a machine," Diamond told The Washington Post in its 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning piece examining the phenomenon of hot car deaths, "and it is not flawless. Our conscious mind prioritizes things by importance, but on a cellular level, our memory does not. If you're capable of forgetting your cell phone, you are potentially capable of forgetting your child."

Parents across the socioeconomic spectrum forget their kids in the back seat, according to The Post report, which examined the cases of parents criminally charged in their children's deaths.

Read the full story on The Washington Post: Fatal Distraction: Forgetting A Child In The Back Seat Of A Car Is A Horrifying Mistake. Is It A Crime?

"The quality of prior parental care seems to be irrelevant," Diamond told The Post. "The important factors that keep showing up involve a combination of stress, emotion, lack of sleep and change in routine, where the basal ganglia is trying to do what it's supposed to do, and the conscious mind is too weakened to resist. What happens is that the memory circuits in a vulnerable hippocampus literally get overwritten, like with a computer program. Unless the memory circuit is rebooted such as if the child cries, or, you know, if the wife mentions the child in the back it can entirely disappear."

Some parents who accidentally forgot their children in the back seat were acquitted. Most faced public vilification. All face a lifetime of grief and guilt.

No one thought parents would be saddled with such heartache in the early 1990s when car safety experts recommended rear-facing child seats in the back of the car to reduce the potential for injury or death to children when front passenger-side airbags deployed.

Fennell, the Kids and Cars founder, and other child safety advocates, have called on Congress to direct the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to require new vehicles to be equipped with systems that detect the presence of a child or other occupant left alone in a vehicle and issue warnings to prevent vehicular heatstroke.

Last month, U.S. Reps. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois and Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey announced they were including the recommended changes in House Resolution 2, known as the Moving Forward Act.

Separate bills to require automakers to install technology to warn parents their kids are in the back seat are moving through the House and Senate.

"Even if a person is out of position in a seat, the technology can easily sense that because it already knows who's in the car," Fennell says. "If a baby's all alone, all sorts of alarms will go off."

Both Fennell and Null, the meteorologist, worry about what could happen when the pandemic ends and people return to their normal routines after what is a prolonged period of stress for Americans.

"We are extremely worried about that," Fennell says. "The No 1 indicator for a child being left alone in a car is a change in routine. We don't have any normal anymore. Maybe every day will be seen somewhat as a change in routine."

Adds Null: "Are people more stressed and are their routines so disrupted they don't know whether they're coming or going? What will the end of the year look like with all this confusion in parents' lives? It's a whole new landscape."

According to Null's research, cars can heat up quickly, even on mild days. For example:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration offers some tips for parents:

View original post here:
Why Fewer Kids Are Dying In Hot Cars -- And Why Number May Spike - Patch.com

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