Incidence of Hot Tap Water Scalds After the Introduction of Regulations in Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hot water scalds can be quite debilitating for a prolonged period of time. It has been previously determined that the severity of hot water scalds increases in a logarithmic trend with water temperature, which has led to legislations requiring changes to the physical environment to reduce the temperature of hot water. In September 2004, Ontario changed its Building Code, requiring all new or renovated residential buildings to lower the maximum setting of their hot water heaters to 49°C (120°F). The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the legislation at reducing both the overall incidence and hospitalizations caused by hot tap water scalds. Hot tap water scald cases were identified from the National Ambulatory Care Reporting System and Discharge Abstract Database databases provided by Canadian Institute for Health Information for April 2002 to March 2010. Annual incidences, hospitalizations, and outcomes were recorded. There were a total of 6952 hot tap water scald cases in Ontario, including 408 hospitalizations in the 8-year period. The average annual incidence rate for hot tap water scalds for the study period was 6.93 cases per 100,000 population and the average hospitalization rate was 0.4 cases per 100,000 population. The high-risk population group of children and elderly comprised the majority of hospitalization cases (60%); however, adults are responsible for the majority of the ambulatory cases (67%). There was a significant decrease in the age-standardized monthly ambulatory scald cases per 100,000 population after the intervention of 0.01055 (95% confidence interval [CI] [0.004, 0.017]; P = .0018) with a rate of change of 0.9455 (95% CI [0.90, 0.98]; P < .0001) and a long-term decrease of 0.19 per 100,000. There was no significant difference in length of stay of hospitalized cases after the intervention (rate ratio = 0.91; 95% CI (0.70, 1.18); P = .4624). Overall, the regulation of limiting the maximum hot water temperature in residential homes has had a positive impact on reducing the overall number of hot tap water scalds; however, they still cause a considerable amount of morbidity because the number of hospitalized cases did not change significantly. In addition to implementing regulations, active prevention and educational campaigns are still necessary to eliminate this preventable injury.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".