"There are cases of children dying on days as cool as 70 degrees Fahrenheit," said lead author Catherine McLaren, MD, clinical instructor in emergency medicine. Though past research has documented the temperature spike inside a car on extremely hot days, this is the first time anyone has looked at cooler days, she added.
McLaren collaborated with James Quinn, MD, associate professor of emergency medicine, and Jan Null, an independent certified consulting meteorologist, to measure the temperature rise inside a parked car on sunny days with highs ranging from 72 to 96 degrees F. Their results, published in the July issue of the journal Pediatrics, showed that a car's interior can heat up by an average of 40 degrees F within an hour, regardless of ambient temperature. Eighty percent of the temperature rise occurred within the first half-hour.
"On a cool day, you don't feel hot so you believe it will be OK," Quinn said. "But ambient temperature doesn't matter; it's whether it's sunny out." Much like the sun can warm a greenhouse in winter, it can also warm a parked car on cool days. In both cases, the sun heats up a mass of air trapped under glass.
"Cars get hot, we know this intuitively," Null said. "But this study tells us that cars get hot very fast." McLaren, Quinn and Null hope their work will help educate parents and caretakers about the risk associated with leaving a child or pet in a parked car. Null said a substantial number of caretakers intentionally leave children behind because they mistakenly think conditions are safe.
In such cases, the caretaker
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5-Jul-2005