Study Details Child Injuries in Truck Beds

Children who ride in the back of a pickup truck are often thrown from the vehicle and seriously injured, but California and most other states do not require that they be protected, pediatric researchers said Wednesday.

“A kid traveling in the back of a pickup truck is an unguided missile,” said Dr. Phyllis Agran, an associate professor of pediatrics at UC Irvine College of Medicine who has monitored children’s injuries at local hospitals for more than 10 years.

Children are much more frequently ejected from pickups than adults, even in the absence of a collision, Agran said. Often they fall out when the truck accelerates, swerves or goes over a speed bump.

Dr. George Anthony Woodword, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Utah School of Medicine, agreed.

At a national conference of pediatricians Wednesday, he presented a study involving 40 children who were injured when they fell or were thrown from a pickup. “Thirty-eight percent of the injuries occurred in non-crash events,” he reported.

Noting that national sales of compact pickup trucks increased 300% from 1980 to 1986, Woodword said legislators and the public need to recognize the danger and take steps to protect children.

Agran noted that in California, dogs must be harnessed when riding in the back of a truck, but there is no legislation that directly addresses people riding in a truck bed. However, children under 4 must be restrained at all times in cars and trucks.

Woodword spoke at the Anaheim Hilton and Towers Hotel, where more than 3,000 pediatricians from the American Pediatric Society, the Society for Pediatric Research and the Ambulatory Pediatric Assn. met for scientific discussions this week.

Agran attended the meetings but did not present her research here. However, co-researcher Diane Winn gave a report on the UCI project to the American Trauma Society in Washington last Thursday, and she and Agran described their results Wednesday in an interview.

The UCI study covered children taken to 10 Orange County hospitals after falls out of trucks from 1980 to 1989.

Of these, 201 children were injured while riding in the cab of the truck, 89 while riding in the back, Winn said. Four of those children died after they were thrown from the truck bed in a crash.

She noted that 24% of the children were injured when there was no crash; rather, they fell out when the pickup swerved, turned a corner or sped up.

Enclosing the back of the truck does not ensure that children riding there won’t be injured, she added; 25% of injuries involving children riding in back occurred in enclosed trucks--sometimes when they were ejected from the back.

Woodword reported similar results--children “banging around in the back of the cab. Twenty-seven percent of our patients were injured like that--five of those very seriously, with head injuries, internal injuries.”