It’s been a great winter for sledding. So good, in fact, that the number of serious sledding injuries is way up. Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC) said that so far this winter there have been nearly twice as many spinal injuries than there were in all of 2007. Some 13 patients have been admitted for sledding injuries, compared to 6 in 2007.

That doesn’t include the head bumps, bruises and scrapes that are not serious enough for admittance.

Tynisha Webber, 23, of Hutchinson is a classic example of how fast things can go wrong on an icy hill.

She went sliding with her two sons, aged 4 and 5, last week at Rocket Hill, the local sledding spot in Hutchinson. Her son begged her go down; “Come with us Mom!” She got on a saucer. Her youngest son climbed a double-wide sled with a friend’s daughter who was 13, and they headed down the hill with Webber trailing behind. She saw the jump coming when it was too late.  Later people who saw it said that when they flew had three feet of air beneath them before they landed.

“My son flew off and bruised his cheek. My friends daughter,  she was fine. I hit solid ice on my bottom. I felt crunch, crunch. I laid there and thought, ‘I have to call 911.’”

Today she’s in a body cast in a hospital bed at HCMC. She’ll have to wear the cast for at least three months while the smashed vertebrae in her lower back heals.

“I was close to being paralyzed,” she said.

Her sons will have to say with their father until she can take care of them again, and she won’t be able to work her job as a home health aid. The only good news is that social workers at the hospital helped her sign up for Minnesota Care, so at least the worst of her health bill will be covered, she said.

“It’s not what you expect when you go out to have fun with your kids,” she said.

HCMC officials said they expect to see more sledding injuries because the ice under the snow makes the hills especially slick. Out of the 13 people admitted this winter, 11 were in 2008 — five in the last week of December. Since New Year’s, they’ve had two more.

Here is the list of safety tips from HCMC:

•    Choose designated sledding hills with a gentle slope and long run-off area; avoid steep hills
•    Avoid ice-covered hills
•    Stay away from roads, lakes, rivers, heavily wooded areas, parking lots, etc.
•    Make sure the sliding area is free of obstacles
•    Be aware of others sliding on the hill
•    Dress appropriately – layers are best because they can also help “cushion” any falls and wear a helmet
•    Don’t pile too many people on one sled
•    Always ride on the sled sitting and facing forward
•    Avoid jumps or piles of snow that can cause a sled to become airborne
•    Children under 12 should be supervised by an adult
•    Children under 5 should be accompanied by an adult on the sled
•    Don’t “drink and sled,” alcohol use and sledding do not mix!
•    Seek medical attention if you suspect an injury

Webber has some ideas as well. She’d like the city of Hutchinson to mark the jumps with colored spray paint. At least that way sliders could see them before it’s too late.

What’s your sledding story?

The smell on a smoker is unmistakable. So is the smell in room where smokers have smoked, even if it was yesterday or last week. Now, there’s a term for it — thirdhand smoke.  Doctors from MassGeneral Hospital for Children in Boston came up with the term to describe the toxic chemicals that lay invisibly on surfaces and in clothing, which, they say, are especially harmful to children. Opening the window, it seems, is just not good enough to eliminate the risk.

More importantly, they say, is that most people don’t know that thirdhand smoke is dangerous.

You can read the article here in the journal Pediatrics, or read the story here published last week in the New York Times. 

The authors defined third-hand smoke as “toxins (that) take the form of particulate matter deposited in a layer onto every surface within  the home; in loose household dust; and as volatile toxic compounds that ‘off gas’ into the air over days, weeks, and months.”

Nothing is scarier than the thought of invisible toxins coating the hands of little kids. “They crawl play on, touch and mouth contaminated surfaces.  At up to .25 grams per day, the dust ingestion rate in infants is more than twice that of adults,” the article says.

The main point of the Pediatrics article was to find out how many people are aware that residual smoke, or thirdhand smoke, is dangerous.  In their survey of about 1500 adults, they found that 93 percent of them recognized that secondhand smoke is harmful to children. But only 61 percent believed that thirdhand smoke is a risk to kids. Nearly a quarter said they did not know whether it was harmful or not.

It’s not enough, they say, to just not smoke around kids. Parents should impose strict no smoking bans in their homes and cars to eliminate the risk, the researchers said.

I always thought the smell was reason enough. What do you do when you have smokers in the family? Tell them strip before they come in the house? Keep a bio-hazard suit on hand in the coat closet? Do you have any other ideas?

Question: What is the citizenship of a baby born on an airplane between Amsterdam and Boston? 

That’s what happened this morning, according to a story published on line today on the Boston Globe web site.  A Ugandan woman gave birth to a baby girl somewhere over Canada while on board Northwest Flight 59.

Two doctors sprang into action and laid her across a row of seats while two passengers held up blankets to create a delivery room. (One of the doctors, Dr. Natarajan Raman, is a radiology oncologist from Minneapolis.)

Her baby, a 6 1/2 pound girl she named Sasha, was born at about 9 a.m. when the doctors snipped the umbilical cord, the entire plane erupted in applause.

Answer: Canada

And Happy New Year!!    

You’ve heard about the virginity pledge, right? That’s when an adolescent swears to abstain from sex until marriage. The idea was created by an Evangelical Christian organization, and touted by other religious groups as part of the movement for abstinence only sex education.

By 1995 13 percent of American adolescents reported taking the virginity pledge. The federal government uses the number of virginity pledges as a benchmark to prove the success of the $200 million a year it spends on abstinence-only sex education.

It turns out that an abstinence promise made is a promise to be broken  — or  denied. Five years after taking the pledge, 82 percent of adolescents said they never made such a promise, according to a study published today in the journal Pediatrics.

Researchers at Harvard followed 900 carefully matched teenagers for five years. The kids were equivalent in religious beliefs, educational and economic levels. 300 of them took the pledge and the rest did not. Five years later the only difference between them was the the pledgers were less likely to use condoms or other birth control, or be tested for STDs.

“Virginity pledges may not affect sexual behavior, but may decrease the likelihood of taking precautions during sex. Clinicians should provide birth control information to all adolescents, especially virginity pledgers,” the researchers concluded.

Glucosamine is out. Way out. Weight loss and low-impact exercise are in.

That’s the latest news from the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons on how to best treat osteoarthritis off the knee. I know, it’s not much for people with deteriorating joints, but at the moment it’s all they’ve got.

The AAOS reviewed all of the available research on the cornucopia of treatments of OA for the knee, and found that most of them really aren’t worth the journal paper they’re printed on  — nor the millions of dollars that went into developing some of them.

Hyaluronic acid? (Think of it as a lube job for the knees.) Inconclusive. The surgeons can’t say whether it will help or be useless.

Arthroscopic surgery to clean out the floating junk and smooth out the rough spots? Out.

Knee braces? Out.

So what’s left? Over-the-counter pain killers, weight loss, thigh and leg strengthening, and moderate (low impact) exercise. And let us not forget the ice.