By Paige Dearing
USA TODAY
HONOLULU — The 1-year-old’s temperature was nearly 106 degrees when the ambulance arrived at her babysitter’s home. It was too late.
Aslyn Ryan had been found limp and unresponsive after being left in the car for 50 minutes while her caretaker ran errands, says her mother, Dee Ryan. She spent two days in intensive care and suffered multiple strokes and other hyperthermia-related injuries before she died in 2004 at Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women & Children in Honolulu.
“I never, as a nurse, could have dreamed what the horror of walking into the ER would be to see a code being performed on my own child,” Ryan wrote in testimony to the state Legislature in support of a law that makes leaving a child unattended in a car a violation of the state’s traffic code and sets fines for violators.
Now, the danger of hyperthermia for children left alone in cars is grabbing attention not only from legislatures but also from citizen and corporate groups.
*Non-profit Safe Kids USA teamed up with General Motors and Jan Null, a meteorologist and hyperthermia expert from San Francisco State University, on a media tour last summer to push hyperthermia education in Oklahoma and Texas. “It was good advocacy in getting the word out,” Null says.
*Boy Scouts of America created, with the help of Safe Kids USA, the Automotive Safety Patch program, which allows Cub Scouts and their families to visit five interactive stations that teach topics such as trunk entrapment and the possibility of kids being left in cars. “It should be taught in school so everyone could learn and be informed,” says Boy Scout Zachary Lines, 11, of Troy, Mich.
*Jennie Trowbridge of Flora, Miss., launched her Don’t Forget Your Child campaign last September, selling stickers, safety belt covers and picture frames with its logo. She decided to start the campaign -- and create dontforgetyourchild.org -- last August after the death of a 9-month-old girl in Ocean Spring, Miss. She died when left in her father’s parked car at the bank where he worked all day. “I could not bear the thought that that child sat and cried for her dad or someone, and no one came,” she says.
Every year hyperthermia takes the lives of about 35 children. So far this year, 23 infants and children have died in hot cars, Null’s research shows. Since 1998, 364 have died.
Cars transform into hot-air ovens when direct sunlight heats objects within them.
“Hyperthermia can sneak up on you,” Null says.
People can lose consciousness and their natural cooling mechanisms, like sweating, can shut down once their core body temperature reaches 104 degrees; death occurs at 107 degrees, he says.
Null says children should never be left in vehicles for any period of time.
“I’m an advocate for zero time,” he says. “You don’t leave a child in the car for a 10-minute run into the bank because it ends up being 30 minutes because the person in front of you has 14 foreign checks to cash.”
Many people mistakenly believe cracking windows or leaving the car running with air conditioning creates makes it safe to leave the children.
“Cracking the window doesn’t change the inside temperature by much, and leaving the child in a running car makes them a target to be taken,” says Ryan, who started a non-profit, Hot Spot, to educate parents about the dangers of hyperthermia.
Ryan has worked to establish educational programs and new legislation in Hawaii, where she had lived with Aslyn, and Arizona, where she now resides.
Ryan shared her personal story as part of the testimony for Hawaii’s revised hyperthermia bill, which Gov. Linda Lingle signed into law on June 13. The law says any person who leaves a child younger than 9 years old in a car alone will be charged with a traffic code violation.
Ryan says no law really matters unless it is accompanied by awareness. It’s important for the public to realize that hyperthermia death isn’t just something that happens to others, she says.
“This has no socio-economic boundaries,” Ryan says. “It can happen to anyone.”
High-, low-tech reminders
Is there a way to ensure a child isn’t left in a car?
Baby Alert makes the ChildMinder System, ($59.95, babyalert.info), a device that clips to a car seat and alerts a parent via key-chain alarm if the seat belt is latched and the parent moves more than 15 feet from the car. An option to the clip: a weight-sensing pad under the car-seat cushion.
“I don’t know that any device can be preventative,” says Barbara Caracci of the National Safety Council. She says most hyperthermia deaths result from parents who intentionally leave children in cars while they run errands.
As a no-cost option, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests leaving a stuffed animal or diaper bag in the passenger seat as a reminder.