Don’t throw your kids in the air if you’ve got a ceiling fan, doctors say

It can be fun to play with your child by putting them on your shoulders or hoisting them over your head, but having your ceiling fan running can be dangerous.

Experts warn that the risk of a child hitting a ceiling fan is usually overlooked and can lead to serious injury or death.

A study in the journal Pediatrics found between 2013 and 2021, emergency rooms saw 20,500 injuries from ceiling fans.

And data from the Consumer Product Safety Commission shows that 2,300 children are treated in emergency rooms each year for head injuries caused by ceiling fans.

The Pediatrics study found that deep wounds were the most commonly treated ceiling fan injuries, accounting for three out of five of these ER cases. Skull fractures accounted for five to 18 percent of cases.

However, many more are probably not counted.

Dr. Holly Hughes Garza, principal investigator and epidemiologist at Dell Children’s Trauma and Injury Research Center in Austin, Texas, told MedicalXPress.com, “It’s important to keep in mind that we only looked at children who went to the emergency room for their injury. . so we’re not talking about every kid who hit their head on a fan.

“There are probably a lot more kids who are going to get that and they don’t really seek medical help.”

The study found that head injuries from ceiling fans are most common in two age groups: infants under one year old and children as young as four years old.

In addition, children under three were twice as likely to be injured by being lifted or thrown by an adult compared to older children, the study found.

“For very young children, even babies, we see that they can be hit by a ceiling fan when an adult lifts them into the air and actually lifts or throws them to crash into the ceiling fan,” said Dr. Garza.

“This can sometimes be done playfully, and someone just doesn’t realize the fan is there, or they accidentally lift the child and the ceiling is so low they hit the fan.”

While many of these injuries are treatable, others can be fatal.

In 2019, a stepfather in Argentina accidentally killed his six-month-old daughter when he threw her into the air while playing and smashed her into the ceiling fan.

That same year, a two-year-old girl in Malaysia died of the same cause.

Dr. Garza said many cases occur in children who use bunk beds or loft beds, as well as any other type of furniture that is high enough off the ground to get a child close to a ceiling fan.

‘We get used to how our rooms look. You have a certain layout, you have the bed in a certain position and it can be partially under the fan,” she said.

“You don’t really think much about it, so if you add two and two together, that hey, you know, the bed that’s 3 feet high is right under a fan with a 2-foot drop on a 2-foot ceiling. .5 meters high.’

“If my 7-year-old is on the edge of that bed, that’s a problem.”