An article published yesterday in the New York Times raises serious questions about product safety issues concerning bed rails, and is worth our notice here in Oregon. The paper’s reporting is built around the shocking revelation that the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Food and Drug Administration have both “known for more than a decade about deaths from bed rails but had done little to crack down on the companies that make them.”
Even the fact that two government agencies had so much evidence raising questions about these dangerous products came to light only after a woman whose mother died in a bed rail accident launched a persistent letter-writing campaign. The woman became concerned about safety issues after her 81-year old mother died when she was “apparently strangled after getting her neck caught in side rails used to prevent her from rolling out of bed” at the nursing home where she lived.
The newspaper reports that data compiled by the CPSC documented 150 adult deaths, mainly among senior citizens, as a result of bed rails between 2003 and mid-2012. “Over the same time period, 36,000 mostly older adults – about 4,000 a year – were treated in emergency rooms with bed rail injuries,” the Times adds.