How Can a Lawyer Evaluate a Child’s Chemical-Contact Injury?
We use a wide variety of chemicals every day, often without thinking about the dangers they can pose. When children are nearby, we have to stop and think about those risks. Many common household items, from cleaning agents to hair-care products, can burn a child’s skin or damage their eyes, and small children rarely understand that a product can hurt them. This page covers injuries from chemicals that touch the skin or splash into the eyes. For swallowed or inhaled chemicals, see our page on poisoning. For more about injuries to the skin, read about chemical burns.
A child’s chemical injury is often caused by someone’s negligence or by a defective product. If your child has been hurt, contact child chemical injury attorney Jeffrey Killino at 878-888-7878 to learn more about your legal options. Your call is free and confidential.
Which Household Chemicals Injure Children’s Skin and Eyes?
Many accidents that injure children could have been avoided with proper supervision and with well-designed, child-resistant packaging. The products involved are often ordinary things kept in a kitchen, a bathroom, a garage or a laundry room. Bleach and household cleaners, including drain and oven cleaners, are among the most common, and you can read more on our page about bleach and household cleaner injuries. Paints, varnishes and paint strippers can burn skin on contact, as covered on our page on paint and varnish injuries. Fertilizers and pesticides are another source, which we explain on our fertilizer and pesticide injury page.
Other products are less obvious. Pool chemicals can cause severe burns to skin and eyes. Laundry and dishwasher detergent pods can burst when a child squeezes them and splash into the eyes, where they can cause serious damage. Hair-care products such as relaxers, dyes and straighteners contain strong chemicals that can burn a child’s scalp, face and eyes.
A chemical burn can be more serious than it first looks. The damage can continue for as long as the chemical stays on the skin, so a burn that seems minor at first can get deeper over the following minutes and hours. An eye exposure can cause pain, redness and blurred vision, and in serious cases scarring of the surface of the eye and lasting vision loss. Poisonous materials in the home must be closely guarded, and children must be watched at all times when they are near them. Because small children do not understand the concepts of injury or death, they cannot be expected to protect themselves.
What Should You Do After a Child’s Chemical Exposure?
Seek prompt professional advice after a chemical exposure, especially when the eyes are involved or the child has severe symptoms. In the United States, Poison Control can be reached at 1-800-222-1222. Call 911 for a life-threatening emergency. Tell the clinician or poison specialist the product name, the route of exposure and when it happened.
Follow product-specific medical instructions rather than assume the same first-aid method applies to every chemical. Keep the container or a clear photograph of its label when it is safe to do so. Medical care comes before photographing an injury or preserving evidence.
For general background, see MedlinePlus information on chemical burns.
Who Is Responsible for a Child’s Chemical Injury?
Children’s chemical injuries often occur because of someone’s negligence or a defective product, and sometimes both are involved.
When Can Negligence Support a Child’s Chemical-Injury Claim?
When someone takes on the responsibility to supervise or care for a child, that person and, in many cases, their employer have a duty to do the job with reasonable care for the child’s health and safety. When a breach of that duty causes a child’s injury, the person in whose care the child was placed may be found liable for damages in an action for negligence. If your child was under the care of a babysitter, a daycare center, a children’s camp or a school, for example, and was allowed access to chemicals such as cleaners or pesticides that burned the skin or eyes, the supervisor and the supervisor’s employer may be held liable for the injury and its costs.
If the person responsible was a public school employee, the school and the employee may be immune from liability if state law provides for it. The immunity may be complete, so that neither can be held liable, or partial, so that they can be found liable but are relieved of paying damages above a certain amount. Claims against public schools often have short notice deadlines, so it is important to speak with a lawyer quickly.
When Can a Product Defect Support a Child’s Chemical-Injury Claim?
In some cases, a supervisor’s negligence combines with the fault of a product’s manufacturer or retailer in causing a child’s chemical injury. In that case, actions for negligence against the supervisor and the employer, and actions for product liability against the manufacturer and others in the product’s chain of distribution, may be brought together.
Even when no supervisor was careless, the manufacturer of a chemical product may be found liable for a child’s injuries in a product liability action if a defect in the product was a cause of the injury. That liability can extend to anyone in the chain of distribution, such as the seller or distributor. In chemical injury cases, product liability claims are often based on a failure to warn or on defective packaging. If a manufacturer or seller fails to provide warnings that are adequate to alert the consumer to a product’s dangers, the product may be found unreasonably dangerous, and therefore defective. The adequacy of instructions for safe use can also be considered a defect. And if a container has no safety features, or inadequate ones, to keep children from opening it and reaching a harmful chemical, the packaging may be found defective in a product liability suit.
Why Should Families Preserve the Container, Packaging and Warnings?
Where a product is involved, keep its container, label, instructions and purchase information if this can be done safely. Photographs of the packaging and the circumstances of exposure can help identify the product and the warnings available to the caregiver.
A legal review may consider whether packaging, warnings, instructions or the conduct of a responsible caregiver contributed to the injury. Those issues should be evaluated against the evidence and applicable law rather than assumed from the fact that a chemical burn occurred.
A chemical-contact injury may involve burned skin, eye damage or lasting scarring. The legal investigation should identify the substance, how exposure happened and whether packaging, warnings, supervision or another failure contributed. Swallowed or inhaled toxic substances are addressed separately on our child poisoning page.
How Can a Child Chemical Injury Lawyer Help?
If your child was burned or hurt by a chemical because of someone’s negligence or a defective product, contact child chemical injury attorney Jeffrey Killino at 878-888-7878. We can preserve the product and its packaging, review the warnings and the medical records with experts, identify every responsible party and pursue compensation for your child’s treatment, scarring, any lasting vision problems and future care. Filing deadlines for a child’s claim vary by state, and in many states a court must approve a settlement for a minor, so it is wise to speak with us early.product, contact attorney Killino at 877-875-2927 for experienced and dedicated assistance with your case.
