It seems so unbelievable when we read it on the news, but child deaths from hyperthermia are on the rise—and it’s because parents are simply forgetting their children are in the car.
By Anastacia Mott Austin

It’s beginning to sound distressingly familiar. Mr. Goodfather leaves home with his infant strapped into a carseat in the back of the minivan. Usually he drops the baby off at daycare before going to his high-stress job, but for some reason on this particular day he forgets, and heads straight to work. The baby is forgotten in the back seat, and the father walks in to work, leaving the child to suffer heatstroke and die in a car that can reach temperatures of 130 degrees or higher.

These cases are on the rise, and they are not simple matters of negligence or child abuse. We are not talking here of the mom who leaves her toddlers in the car all day while she is passed out drunk inside, or who gets her hair done while her babies overheat outside in the van.

Many of the recent cases in the news are of hardworking, caring, responsible “good” parents who love their children and would never dream of leaving them in a hot car, even for a minute.

On August 23rd, a seven-month-old baby was discovered inside a car in a parking lot at the Washington University School of Medicine. The baby had been left in the car by his parents, a doctor and a medical researcher at the university. The infant had apparently been in the car for over three hours on a day that reached into the 90s. According to statistics posted on the website for Hyperthermia Deaths of Children in Vehicles, the inside temperature of a vehicle will rise 19 degrees in 10 minutes, and up to 50 degrees in one to two hours. That means that the temperature inside that car was as high as 140 degrees.

On the same day, a two-year-old girl was found dead in a parked car at a middle school near Cincinnati, after her mother, an assistant principal at the school, had left her there by mistake.

The two recent incidents mark the 21st and 22nd vehicle heat-related deaths of children this year.

Small children and babies have immature respiratory systems, and their bodies heat up at much faster rates than adults’ bodies do. “Children have a higher anabolic rate than adults” said Dr Lynn Sears to reporters at WMTV in Madison, Wisconsin. “So their body heat rises two or three times as fast [as] adults. Given a child in a hot car and an adult in a hot car, the [child] will overheat much more quickly and the results can be much more severe than adults.”
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