KEEPING YOUR CHILDREN AWAY FROM HOT POTS
If your baby is learning to walk and falls into a pot of boiling water on a low stove or the ground, how would you feel about it? Of course, it would be heartbreaking. Children’s burns are a rising problem, especially in the ger districts. The use of electric pots and kettles has been increasing, because these pots heat up quickly. The problem is that a ger is a small space, so babies walk everywhere in the ger and touch whatever they can reach.
Parents have to take great care to protect their kids from burns. Twenty-six children between the ages of zero to four died and many more children suffered burns in 2016.
A lot of children experience severe burns because their skin is very thin, and require skin grafts and plastic surgery, with many injuries resulting in disfigurement.
Providing a burned child with emergency first aid and proper treatment is very important. Without proper care a burn victim can die.
Since January 1, the Burn Treatment Department (BTD) of the National Trauma and Orthopedic Research Center (NTORC) has received over 90 children who have suffered burn injuries.
Dr. G.Amarmend of the BTD pointed out that most of the department's patients are children from zero to five years old, and the BTD performs burn treatment surgery on five to six children a day. He noted that nearly 3,000 children from zero to fifteen years old received burn treatment at the NTORC in 2016.
The NTORC’s head doctor, T.BatErdene, said that parents don’t take care of their babies when they are just learning to walk, so a lot of small babies suffer from burn injuries. He added that one problem is that many parents make first aid mistakes, such as using unsanitary wound care products and expired oint- ment.
According to a report from the NTORC, electric pots were involved in 35 percent of burns. Electric pots have very short power cords and they are usually placed on the ground near a power strip or outlet in a ger or house. The pots on the ground present an enormous threat to children.
A three-year-old boy fell on top of an electric pot of boiling tea while his grandfather, who was watching him, left him alone for a few minutes. The boy was immediately taken to a hospital, but unfortunately, he died from complications resulting from his burns.
There are a couple of ways to protect Mongolia’s children from burn injuries.
This year, the Family, Youth, and Child Development Agency and the Public Health Institute are going to carry out campaigns to educate parents about common childhood accidents and child abuse, and will give parents advice on how to prevent accidents, especially burns, and to improve home safety.
Raising a parent’s awareness about how to prevent injury is of significant importance to dealing with the problem of an increased number of burn accidents. Parents need to play a more active role in the raising of their babies.
G.Jamyan, a state honored journalist, noted that there are a lot of traditional ways to raise children that can keep them safe. For example, tying a baby learning to walk to a table, the legs of a bed, or a ger’s wall is the best way to keep them away from a hazardous electric pot in a ger.
Putting dangerous items, such as hot beverage containers, hot pots, and irons, that can be harmful to our children out of reach is a specific step that can be taken to prevent accidents.
Mongolians use a wide range of essential utility knots, because as the descendents of nomadic people, tying ropes is an everyday necessity. Tying up a child with the wrong knot could be dangerous, so using the correct knot is very important.