Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 31, 1993 TAG: 9310310088
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
And if all goes according to tradition, parents won't find any problems.
At the same time, emergency room officials say they are braced for their own Halloween phenomena - scrapes, twists, broken limbs and more serious injuries that occur when children scamper in the gloom across streets in ill-fitting dark costumes.
Inspect the candy, yet let the child run into the street.
When it comes to hazards of modern life, say injury prevention and risk analysts, Americans have proved singularly inept at determining what to worry about. From radon to iron pills to small batteries that are mistakenly swallowed by the dozens each year, people frequently let down their guard about things that can really hurt them while taking extraordinary care to ward off perceived hazards such as tainted treats.
When a scare about the pesticide Alar hit, people reacted swiftly and left apples rotting on store shelves.
Yet parents consistently misjudge the ability of children to cross the street safely, contributing to more than 3,000 child fatalities each year, said Angela Mickalide, program director of the National Safe Kids Campaign. Depth perception, peripheral vision and other physical limitations leave children at risk in traffic until age 10, and children younger than 6 often think cars are alive and can see them, Mickalide said.
Parents underestimate risks of falls, pedestrian accidents, burns and other common killers that are well within a parent's power to combat, Mickalide said. In a recent poll done for her program, for example, parents cited violent crime as the top threat to their children, even though children younger than 14 are seven times more likely to die of unintentional injury.
As real risks go, "Halloween sadism" ranks low, said Joel Best, a sociology professor at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale who researched 78 reported incidents of treat-tampering going back to 1958.
Most of the reported tampering incidents are exposed as hoaxes usually rigged by youngsters, or, in a few tragic cases, assaults by family members, such as the Texas father who poisoned his son's candy with cyanide in 1974.
Best said he found no documented fatality from poisoned Halloween candy, and even reports of injuries were virtually impossible to verify.
The Halloween specter, Best found in his study, fades in and out, with unsubstantiated problems peaking soon after the Tylenol murders in 1982, virtually disappearing in other years, a modern-day ghost story of the season.
The perennial anxiety "is perfectly consistent with Halloween being a time to play pranks," Best said. "Halloween used to be about ghosts and goblins. We don't believe in those anymore, but we do believe in criminals."
In the 10 years the National Confectioner's Association has run its Halloween Hot Line, the group has yet to verify an instance of tampering, said spokesman Bill Sheehan. "These myths become truisms."
At the National Capitol Poison Center, however, education coordinator Rose Ann Soloway said the center's "Button Battery" Hot Line gets hundreds of calls each year about adults and children who accidentally swallow the small, flat batteries used in cameras and other devices.
Likewise, parents call in a frenzy, she said, if a child swallows bleach, even though bleach causes no harm, and requires no action. But other parents who nonchalantly phone to say a child has eaten iron pills, have to be persuaded to act quickly because parents wrongly equate the iron with vitamins.
Iron pills kill up to a dozen children a year. Just a few pills can prove fatal because the antidote is itself dangerous and cannot always be safely administered.
by CNB