Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Child car seat safety pushed

A crash test dummy for a 10-year-old has been proposed.

By Lisa Zagaroli / Detroit News Washington Bureau

Jason Evans New SafeGuard allows kids to stay in a full harness until they weigh 65 pounds. It costs $429. Comment on this story Send this story to a friend Get Home Delivery

WASHINGTON -- The National Transportation Safety Board plans to call today for greater protection for kids in cars as part of a renewed effort to nudge states and safety advocates to clear hurdles that remain in making sure children are safer as passengers.

Securing children, particularly those over age 4, in light vehicles still poses public awareness and engineering challenges.

Parents don't always heed recommendations that they place kids in booster seats that provide better protection than a seat belt alone, and laws in Michigan and other states lag far behind federal safety suggestions that kids use boosters until at least age 8.

Despite a number of engineering advancements, safety officials are still struggling to understand exactly how children's bodies react in crashes.

"It really is a challenge," said Stephen Kratzke, associate administrator for rule making at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

In 2004, overall child fatalities rose slightly, with car crashes killing 510 children 3 and younger, 487 ages 4 to 7 and 1,608 ages 8 to 15, according to NHTSA's National Center for Statistics and Analysis.

There are several initiatives under way to provide more protection for kids in cars.

• NHTSA recently proposed a crash test dummy that simulates a 10-year-old, an important move toward developing restraints for kids who aren't quite big enough to have an adult seat belt fit them properly.

Booster seats are now tested with dummies that weigh 50 and 62 pounds, and the new dummy would allow testing to evaluate the safety of someone weighing up to 77 pounds.

Still, the agency has yet to figure out how to have a dummy measure one of the most common dangers for kids -- abdominal injuries.

"Just as children's proportions are different from those of adults, we know that children's bodies react differently to the forces of a motor vehicle crash," Dr. Carol Berkowtz, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the agency this month.

"Rather than continuing the limited approach of basing the biomechanics of child-sized dummies on mathematical scaling of adult data, the AAP strongly urges NHTSA to conduct and/or fund additional research to develop the much-needed human pediatric data. As pediatricians, we know that children are not just small adults."

Researchers involved in a comprehensive study of crashes involving kids are working to construct a test abdomen for a child-sized dummy to measure the risk of "seat belt syndrome."

"Abdominal organ injury is part of the constellation of injuries known as seat belt syndrome and, after head injury, abdominal injury is among the most common body regions injured in belted children in crashes," said researchers with the Partners for Child Passenger Safety, who are working with Ford Motor Co., Takata Corp. and the University of Virginia on that project.

• Today, safety engineers will unveil a new child seat called SafeGuard that allows kids to stay in a full harness until they weigh 65 pounds, rather than moving to a booster seat when they reach 40 pounds. The restraint is unique in that it attempts to eliminate all of the most common problems parents face with child seats, like putting it in the car too loosely, with advanced technology like automatic retractors that pull the seat tight and an aluminum frame that will absorb energy in a crash.

The seat's developers say advancements in child occupant protection have been so much slower than progress for adult safety that they hope the new seat will put more pressure on traditional seat makers to adopt technologies that could make the restraints more foolproof.

"In the child seat industry, innovation has not happened," said Steve Wallen, president of SafeGuard Seats, a division of IMMI, an Indiana company that has worked in auto, bus and child safety for years but had never produced its own child seat. "A child seat today is pretty much like one built in the 1980s."

One potential problem with the seat is it costs $429, more than twice the price of some others.

"Our goal is not to sell a million child seats a year, but to let parents know that engineered safety equipment is not just another baby accessory, and to show other seat manufacturers that there's a market for parents who are willing to pay more for safety features," Wallen said. "We want to start a revolution in the child seating industry."

• New research on the safety of booster seats indicates they're 58 percent more effective in side-impact crashes, one of the most deadly types of crashes, than an adult seat belt alone. Previous studies had shown booster seats provide that level of improvement in other types of crashes as well.

"Benefits are obtained by reduction of injuries to the head and face as well as the pattern of injuries to the abdomen and spine known as seat belt syndrome," according to a report by Children's Hospital of Philadelphia unveiled last week at a conference of the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine.

However, the study of 752 side-impact crashes with child occupants raised questions about the effectiveness of the two varieties of booster seats on the market -- high back versus no back.

In side impacts, boosters with high backs provided greater protection than backless boosters. Researchers suspect that parents aren't using the shoulder belt positioner that looks like a piece of webbing attached to the seat bottom of the backless version.

"Our data should not cause parents to abandon the backless booster seat," said biomechanical engineer Kristy Arbogast, the lead investigator, who noted that her own kids ride in backless boosters.

NHTSA is concerned that high-back boosters may introduce more possibility for injury than the backless kind. In its proposed rule for the 10-year-old crash dummy, the agency said as manufacturers start building seats to accommodate taller, heavier kids, it is "still concerned about the potential for excessively heavy high-back belt-positioning seats to cause loading on a child, crushing the chest between the booster seat back and the shoulder belt."

Initial agency testing didn't detect a direct correlation between the size of the seat and chest injury, Kratzke said.

• The NTSB today is expected to re-issue recommendation that states adopt booster seat laws.

Michigan requires child seats only for children 3 and younger, making it one the least protective laws in the nation, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

The NTSB, NHTSA, the insurance institute and other groups have recommended that children be seated in booster seats until they are age 8 and 4 feet 9 inches tall.

There are bills pending in the Michigan Legislature that would bring the state up to the federal recommendation, and Gov. Jennifer Granholm supports the effort, said Anne Readette, a spokeswoman for the Michigan State Police's Office of Highway Safety Planning.

Children under 4 can be restrained in a typical child seat with a built-in harness that keeps kids snug with straps over both shoulders and hips.

Older kids are too small to be optimally protected by a regular seat belt because the shoulder belt tends to cut across their neck or face, sometimes causing them to put the shoulder belt behind their back. That not only cuts upper body protection but also causes the lap belt to ride too high over their fragile abdomens. Booster seats lift children so that the seat belt can fit properly.