WASHINGTON — The nation’s pediatricians keep saying that television can be harmful for babies and toddlers, but this time, they mean it literally. A new study finds that in 2011 alone, televisions falling on children caused some 17,000 injuries that warranted a trip to a hospital in the United States.
And with television screens proliferating in U.S. households — more than half of U.S. homes have three or more TVs — the rate of such injuries is on the rise. Emergency room visits related to toppled TVs have increased 95 percent since 1990.
On average, a TV plummeting from an armoire, bureau or rickety shelf sends a child to a hospital emergency department once every 30 minutes, says a new study in the journal Pediatrics. Almost two in three (64.3 percent) of those injuries occurred in children younger than 5, and boys accounted for a little more than 60 percent of cases.
The most common TV-related injury was to a child’s head or neck, accounting for about 63 percent of those seen in emergency rooms. Some 13.3 percent of smaller children and 7.7 percent of youths 11 to 17 sustained concussions from closed-head injuries. An additional 22 percent of children had injuries to their legs.