Report Shows Injuries from Children's Products Down

A report released last week cited more units of children's products recalled last year than 2013, but that the number of children's product recalls, and the incidents, injuries and deaths related to them all decreased in 2014.

Kids in Danger (KID), a Chicago-based nonprofit dedicated to improving children's product safety, released "A Decade of Data: An In-depth Look at 2014 and a 10-year Retrospective on Children's Product Recalls." The report has been released annually since 2002, and also looks for data trends over the past decade.

The Numbers

The report noted, in 2014, more than 16.8 million units of children's products were recalled, including five recalls with more than a million units per recall. That number is about 5.6 million more than last year, but there were 39 fewer product recalls this year (75 compared with 2013's 114). The percentage of children's recalls its lowest in the last 14 year's of data, with 25 percent of 2014 recalls involving children's products.

For the second straight year, children's clothing products accounted for the most of the children's recalls with 33 percent. Having drawstrings or violating flammability standards are the most common defects. Toys, with 19 percent, were the second most frequent for children's recalls.

Overall, choking and strangulation were the most common hazards for children's products, with 25 and 23 percent, respectively, having those problems. This year, 13 percent involved injuries before the recall occurred—an 85 percent drop from 2013. Three deaths were recorded this year—two from suffocation in an Ace Bayou Corp. Bean Bag Chair and another from strangulation from an Ikea Children's Wall-mounted Lamp.

“When looking through the 10 years of data, it was striking to see how closely related deaths and mandatory standards were,” said KID's Jordan Durrett, who researched and wrote the report. “As a rule, once a mandatory standard was put into place for a certain hazard, like drawstring strangulations, the hazard was no longer associated with deaths. The only exception was the choking hazard small toy parts pose to children that continues to be related to child deaths.”