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Entity reports on the nursery product safety study that showed baby carriers, cribs and strollers sending children to the ER at alarming rates.

Every eight minutes a child younger than three winds up in the emergency room due to an incident involving nursery products.

Baby carriers, cribs/mattresses and strollers posed the biggest risk to babies, according to the Nationwide Children’s Hospital study published in Pediatrics journal.

And while you’d think new technology would have produced safer nursery products over the years, the study showed that, shockingly, injuries have increased nearly 25 percent within the last eight years.

Eighty percent of the incidents resulted from a baby falling out of a product, with most injuries stemming from unsafe baby carries (20 percent), cribs/mattresses (19 percent) and strollers (17 percent).

But hold off before you blame parents. Tracy Mehan, researcher at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, told USA Today that the fault is with unsafe products. The study was meant to point a finger at manufacturers, with Mehan explaining, “If the products had a different design that made them easier to use, there would be less injury.”

Parents using hand-me-down or second-hand products should be particularly on alert thanks to new safety standards. Mehan warns against using cribs made before June 2011 as well as old car seats. The latter can be a serious issue, for example if they have survived a car crash. That could leave old car seats weaker, and less structurally sound.

To keep your baby safe, Mehan says to remember the four R’s:

— Research

— Recalls – This is important because up to 80 percent of recalled children’s products are never returned, the study’s lead author and director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital Gary Smith said.

— Register the product

— Read the manuals (from front to back)

Sixty-six thousand ER visits annually for children under the age of three is far too many. Mehan hopes the study’s eye-opening results will help jolt manufacturers into a change, and much stricter safety protocol.

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