Sipps Congress. Foreign body inhalation causes 5% of deaths in children under 4 years of age

The pediatrician Giovanni Simeone: "80% of these accidents occur in the presence of an adult"

ROME – “The Guide ‘Mum, Dad, can you protect me?’, already released in 2022, is a manual for the prevention of domestic accidents and also contains life-saving manoeuvres strong> It is a guide designed for paediatricians, i.e. general paediatricians, family paediatricians and hospital paediatricians. It is a text which illustrates the anticipatory guides that paediatricians should know to support families in the prevention of domestic accidents but it is also a guide designed above all for parents, who in its pages can find important details, help and suggestions for the prevention of their children, both in indoor and outdoor environments”. This was stated by Giovanni Simeone, family pediatrician in Mesagne, in the province of Brindisi, interviewed by Dire on the occasion of the second day of work of the XXXVI National Congress of the Italian Society of Preventive and Social Paediatrics ( Sipps), which ends tomorrow at the Palazzo degli Affari in Florence.
“The Guide – he continued – is also made up of a series of videos that can be freely downloaded by families from the Sipps website These videos also illustrate foreign body unblocking maneuvers and CPR maneuvers, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, both for infants and for older childrenand, for those who have the skills to do so. , how to use the automatic defibrillator. In any case, it is a really useful tool that covers a series of aspects: from drowning to inhalation of a foreign body. , from car travel to the prevention of zoonoses. Our advice is that parents download the guide, read it and use it”.

The most frequent domestic accidents that we have recorded – the pediatrician then informed – are above all those ofinhalation from a foreign body, which concerns 5% of deaths of children under 4 years of age of age. From the European sites that try to monitor this aspect, it emerges that almost 80% of these accidents occur when an adult is present, who is therefore unaware of the dangers inherent in the world that surrounds your child, especially at home”.
This, concluded Simeone, is an aspect “to which we aim a lot, just as in the Guide we pay great attention to ‘safe cuts’, i.e. the the way in which food must be presented, the ways in which it is offered to children, especially at the beginning of weaning”.