What statistics does the Balloon Council have about children choking on balloons?
This is the long way, but it seems the best way to respond to your comments on the JAMA article and question “do children die from ingesting balloons?” is to give you the following excerpts from our letter to Dr. Rimmel, author of the JAMA article. It describes the difficulty we have had in getting data that we feel is reliable and the steps we took to develop the numbers we now use. ” • In 1992, we requested and got computer printouts from CPSC that tallied choking deaths from balloons. The information is compiled by the National Injury Information Clearinghouse. The information comes from three sources and is tallied separately: (1) death certificates, (2) accident reports from hospitals and (3) reports from medical personnel and news reports. We culled those documents to develop totals, by year, from which we created graphs, charts, etc. These printouts are no longer in our files, probably discarded when we received a newer batch. • In 1994, we requested and received updates of the
