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Record W2614678244

Public Health : The hazards of Halloween

2000· article· en· W2614678244 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Erica Weir

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Medical Association Journal · 2000
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicTraumatic Ocular and Foreign Body Injuries
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsGirlParadeMedicineCeremonyCurfewEveningArtPsychologyArt historyHistory
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

A beautiful wedding ceremony this summer was disturbed by the loud and tearful protestations of the 3-year-old flower girl. When her grandfather asked her what was wrong — ”Don‚t you like your party dress?” — the little girl sobbed and informed him that she really wanted to be a carrot. Apparently she had mistaken the dressing up and pageantry of the wedding for Halloween and had set her heart on being a root vegetable. Perhaps the little flower girl will get her wish on Oct. 31, when she and thousands of other excited youngsters don costumes, apply makeup and engage in the tricks and treats of Halloween. Over the course of the evening, vampires, ghosts and superheroes of all ages will parade through neighbourhoods, fire stations, school gyms and, not infrequently, hospital emergency departments in their quest for candies and sweets. Health care workers who have worked in the emergency department on Halloween night know that it can be an exceptional evening for both ordinary and extraordinary presentations. Physicians need to keep their humour in check and proceed with a higher than normal index of suspicion in order not to miss the usual array of chest pains, syncopal episodes and abdominal discomforts disguised in overweight clowns, bedraggled witches, plump pumpkins and spindly carrots. The literature can assist with identifying some of the more unique risks of Halloween: ocular injuries from flying eggs,1 flatus from Gummy Bears2 and intestinal perforations from sewing needles.3 The last category of injury, which occurs when foreign bodies are purposely placed in treats, may be the most publicized Halloween hazard, but a review of available studies indicates that such events are quite rare and the risk may be exaggerated. Observational studies designed to assess the yield of routine radiologic screening of Halloween candy demonstrated the likelihood of finding a radiopaque item to be very low and reported no cases of significant medical problems.4,5 Perhaps we are looking for risks in the wrong places. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in Atlanta, the main risks on Halloween night are much more pedestrian and obvious. Children are 4 times more likely to be struck by cars on Halloween than on other nights.6 An analysis of childhood pedestrian deaths in the United States from 1975 to 1996 revealed a fourfold increase in the number of deaths on Halloween evening when compared with the same period during all other evenings.6 The reasons for this are many and varied. Children are out in the dark wearing dark costumes, many of which restrict peripheral vision and hearing. They also are excited and distracted and tend to take the shortest rather than the safest route when crossing streets and negotiating traffic. To reduce the risk of harm, the CDC has compiled a common-sense list6 of safety tips that should be reviewed before Halloween night. Pedestrian safety · Parents should establish a route for children in a known neighbourhood. · Children should use flashlights, stay on the sidewalk, stop at intersections and cross intersections in a group. · Motorists should drive slowly and look carefully for children on medians and in alleyways and driveways. · Children should consider wearing makeup instead of masks, or wear masks that do not obscure sight or hearing. General safety planning · Parents should establish a curfew for older adolescents. · Children should travel in small groups, be accompanied by an adult, visit only well-lit houses and remain on porches rather than entering houses. · Children should know their phone numbers, carry coins for emergency telephone calls and have their names and addresses attached to their costumes. · Rigid or sharp costume knives or swords should not be used. · All treats should be brought home so that parents can inspect them. · Adults should prepare for trick-or-treaters by clearing porches, lawns and sidewalks and placing jack-o‚-lanterns away from doorways and landings. —

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.761
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0170.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.021
GPT teacher head0.264
Teacher spread0.243 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2000
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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