Instant Noodle Soups May Pose Serious Burn Risk
If you were surprised to learn that burn doctors hate instant noodle soups, it might never occur to you to give a child a steaming cup of anything. Much less a container full of sticky noodles.
Instant noodle soups, it turns out, have an almost perfect combination of hot, sticky plus dangerous containers and can result in scarring, 2nd degree burns on children. It's a combination that, as NPR reports, is "strangely perfect" for inflicting burns.
You heat water to a boiling point. Pour into a tall and narrow cup. The noodles in that cup stay hotter longer. When a spill occurs, those noodles cling to the skin resulting in deeper burns. A study published in 2007 showed that this results in longer hospital stays for "upper body noodle-soup burns", more than twice as long as scalds from hot liquids alone.
The report , "Instant cup of soup: design flaws increase risk of burns", has some sobering statistics. Although burn sizes tended to be small, almost 12% of the children treated during the study period required grafting. Often, children requiring surgery come in with burns to their "chest, arms, torso, sometimes their privates, occasionally their legs" and those requiring surgery are left with life-long scars and limited mobility.
It's a statistic that could be easily avoided, or at least decreased.
Dr. David Greenhalgh, Chief of Burns at Shriner's Hospital for Children in Northern California, author of the study, reiterated in his NPR interview, the report recommendation:
A "simple redesigning of instant soup packaging with a wider base and shorter height, along with the requirement for warnings about the risks of burns."
Whether giving children, specially toddlers, soups with enough salt to start them on the road to hypertension is a good idea in and of itself can be debated elsewhere.
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