No amount of a time is safe when it comes to leaving your child in a hot car.
This is according to a study on car-related deaths which found that 'hot-car deaths' are more common in infants because a child’s body heats up three to five times faster than an adult
Hot-car deaths occur when children die of heatstroke after being left in cars during high temperatures.
An estimated 38 children die from car-related heatstroke a year, with the number increasing ten-fold from 2003 to 2013.
An analysis of 171 hot-car deaths in the United States between 1995 and 2002 found that in 75 per cent of cases the child was unattended in a car.
The study found that just over half of the cases occurred in children who were unintentionally forgotten and left in the car by mistake.In cases where children were intentionally left in the vehicle, many were due to carers being unaware of how hot the vehicle would become.
Heat-related illness has several symptoms ranging from a prickly heat rash to severe and potentially life-threatening cases of heatstroke. Heatstroke occurs when a child’s core body temperature exceeds about 40 degrees – the longer the exposure, the greater the chance of the child dying.
Symptoms of heat exhaustion include excessive thirst, nausea, vomiting and muscle cramps. A child suffering from hyperthermia, or heat stroke, experiences seizures an delirium.
This inrease is supposedly linked to vehicle safety precautions where children are strapped to seats in the back of cars.
Body temperature regulation is due to homoeostasis, or the body's way of keeping an internal environment. Children are susceptible to hot-car deaths because their temperature-regulation system isn't as developed as adults' are.
Heatstroke happens when too many body fluids are lost through high temperatures and a persona's internal organs are damaged as a result.
Even on more mild days, when temperatures reach early a max of early 20s, children left in vehicles are at risk of heat stroke.
