National Farm Medicine Pt 3

National Farm Medicine Pt 3

Bob Larson
Bob Larson
I’m Bob Larson. The pandemic has thrown us a lot of curve balls that we’ve had to adjust to. One of biggest for farm families with children … was school closures.

National Farm Medicine Center’s Melissa Ploeckelman says numbers from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health show farm safety is a problem worthy of attention …

PLOECKELMAN … “Approximately 33 children are injured on farms every day, and almost every three days, a child dies from an agricultural-related incident.”

Ploeckelman says it’s unclear yet if the pandemic numbers are worse …

PLOECKELMAN … “But we are hearing a lot more stories of children getting injured because they’re at home. They walk out the front door and what was the home environment is now also the work site.”

And, Ploeckelman says if you want to know more …

PLOECKELMAN … “We have a resource called www.aginjurynews.org, that’s A G injury news dot org, and you can go on there and what we doing is we are taking every media mention of a farm incident or fatality and putting them all on this one website.”

Ploeckelman says other sources are out there …

PLOECKELMAN … “All of our other resources that I’ve been talking about, safe play areas, making sure that your kids are doing age-appropriate tasks, all of those can be found at www.cultivatesafety.org.

For more on the National Farm Medicine Center, go to www.marshfieldresearch.org/nfmc

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