Small as a button and shiny as a coin, round batteries are prized for the energy they can store in their size. They have become commonplace in homes, powering remote controls, hearing aids, toys, electric tea lights, watches, greeting cards that play music, and other familiar items.
But doctors have warned that such “button batteries” can harm or even kill people. If you pop it into your mouth and swallow it, as thousands of children do every year, you can quickly become seriously injured.
A growing number of medical associations are calling on battery manufacturers to avoid this threat by producing new products that do not cause fatal injuries if swallowed: button batteries or “coin batteries.”
“The only real solution to the battery problem is to make the batteries themselves safer,” said Dr. Toby Litowitz, founder of the National Capital Poison Center.
When a button battery remains in the body, its electrical current splits water, increasing its alkalinity to dangerous levels similar to bleach. Body tissues may begin to liquefy. Doctors say serious injuries can occur within two hours, and in some cases before parents realize the battery has been swallowed.
As button batteries have become more commonplace, the rate of pediatric emergency visits for battery-related injuries has more than doubled in recent decades, according to a study published in the journal Pediatrics. Doctors say some children end up relying on tubes to breathe and some end up bleeding profusely.
“Unfortunately, these batteries can cause severe damage very quickly, some of which is impossible for surgeons to repair,” said Dr. Chris Jatana, a clinical outcomes surgeon at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio. Yes,” he said.
Jatana became concerned about the risks after caring for a 2-year-old who eventually required a tracheostomy to breathe. “That was the moment that motivated me to think about what I could do to prevent injuries like this from happening in the first place.”
Button battery safety
Here are some recommendations from Nationwide Children’s Hospital:
Some battery manufacturers have tried adding bitter coatings or saliva-activated dyes to snitch on parents.
The Reese Act, a federal law named after a child who died from severe injuries after swallowing a button battery, now requires compartments for such batteries in consumer products to be made more difficult to open, and button batteries requires child-proof packaging.
But advocates say more needs to be done. For example, Litowitz said, hard-to-open packaging doesn’t address the many injuries caused when children swallow unattended or discarded batteries. Among those pushing for safer batteries is biotech entrepreneur Brian Lauricht.
“What makes batteries so great for devices is that they are also dangerous if swallowed,” Lauricht said of button batteries. “They are powerful enough to split water…which causes the pH to spike to Drano levels in minutes.”
Doctors began sounding the alarm about this threat decades ago, when the number of seriously injured children began to rise. One study found that between 1985 and 2009, the rate of accidentally swallowing button batteries that resulted in serious or fatal injury increased more than six times.
Reece Hamsmith died less than two months after swallowing a button battery and sustaining serious injuries. Her mother, Trista Hamsmith, vowed to do everything she could to prevent other children from suffering the same fate.
(Trista Hamsmith)
Litowitz and other researchers noted the growing popularity of 20-millimeter-diameter lithium coin-cell batteries. Their analysis found that 12.6% of children under the age of 6 who ingested button batteries around that size suffered serious complications or death.
“It’s the perfect size to get stuck in the esophagus of small children, especially children under the age of 4,” Litowitz said in an email. “Additionally, these lithium coin batteries have twice the voltage of other coin batteries.”
If no one notices that the battery has been swallowed, doctors may not be able to recognize and diagnose the problem right away. This is because the symptoms may initially resemble those of other childhood illnesses.
The problem has gotten worse over time, with a pediatric study showing that from 2010 to 2019, an average of more than 7,000 children and teens visited emergency rooms each year with battery-related injuries. . The rate of such emergency visits has doubled from 1990 to 2009.
Button batteries were involved in the majority of incidents where the type of battery was known. Researchers have tallied more than 70 deaths from button battery ingestion over time, but Litowitz said this number includes cases documented in medical research and the media, or countries that have ceased operations. It said the actual number could be much higher because it only included cases reported to the button battery intake hotline. 6 years ago.
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles sees about one child a month injured by a button battery, said Helen Arbogast, injury prevention program manager in the general pediatric surgery department at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Children are drawn to shiny objects and are sensitive to the attention adults give to electronic devices, she says.
“Remotes are very interesting to children because of the buttons, colors, etc. Part of children’s natural motor skill development is learning how to open and close things,” Arbogast said. spoke.
She emphasized that time is of the essence. “If parents suspect that their child has swallowed a button battery, it is important to take them to hospital immediately.”
Reece Hamsmith of Texas woke up one morning in 2020 feeling congested and wheezing. His mother, Trista Hamsmith, took her toddler to a pediatrician, who suspected croup. It wasn’t until the day after Reese’s sick Halloween night that Reese’s mother realized the button battery in the remote was dead.
Reece Hamsmith died less than two months after swallowing a button battery and sustaining serious injuries.
(Trista Hamsmith)
Reese underwent emergency surgery, but even after the battery was removed, the damage continued, leaving burn-like holes in his esophagus and windpipe, his mother said. In the weeks that followed, she underwent further surgeries, sedation, and intubation. Reese died less than two months after his injuries.
She was one and a half years old. “After she passed away, I held her one more time and promised her that I would do everything I could to make sure she never died like this again,” Trista Hamsmith said.
A Lubbock mother started the nonprofit Reese’s Purpose and successfully pushed for federal legislation that would impose new requirements on battery compartments, child-safe packaging, and warning labels. Mr Hamsmith was pleased to see these regulations come into force, but regretted that such protections had not been put in place sooner.
“You don’t have to go through what we went through” to inspire action, she says. “People like me should never have to scream at the world.”
The group is also funding research into medical devices that can detect swallowed batteries without exposing children to radiation. Hamsmith hopes the device will be used whenever a child shows possible symptoms. We also worked with Energizer on safety features such as a tell-tale dye that turns blue in saliva.
“The missing element here is the ability to alert the caregiver that something has happened,” said Jeffrey Ross, Energizer’s global category leader for batteries and lights. “This is exactly what Color Alert does. It lets caregivers know that a child may have put something in their mouth that shouldn’t be in their mouth.”
However, Litvitz cautioned that not all batteries contain blue dye, so doctors and parents should not assume that the battery has not been swallowed just because the color is not visible. .
Ross said Energizer has spent tens of millions of dollars on button battery safety research and other efforts in recent years. “I believe we can solve this problem one day,” he said. “But it certainly requires breakthrough innovation.”
Lauricht, co-founder and CEO of Landsdowne Labs, said his company is testing alternative batteries with different types of casings that are meant to be shut down inside the body. Experiments in which the battery was sandwiched between two hams did not show any damage like commercially available button batteries, he said. (Ham is used as a readily available substitute for human gastrointestinal tissue, Lauricht explained.)
One of their challenges, Lauricht said, is to make these changes to achieve the same level of battery performance. But as a father of young children, he says, “I’d rather have a battery that only lasts a year on the shelf…and wouldn’t kill me if my child swallowed it.”
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