When do children get burnt?

Burns are a cause of more than 5000 paediatric hospital admissions per year in England and Wales. Injury prevention and service provision may be better planned with knowledge of burn timing. Prospectively collected records from 1st January 2010 to 31st December 2011 were analysed. All episodes involving patients less than 16 years of age reviewed by the South West Children's Burns Centre were included. Data was collected from 1480 records to investigate seasonal, weekly, and daily variation. Day to day analysis showed significantly more burns occurred on Saturday and Sunday than Monday-Friday (p<0.001). Of all burns, 46% occurred within the time-period 08:00-15:59; however the mean hourly rate of burns was highest between 16:00 and 18:59. Of the larger burns (>10% body surface area), 38% occurred after 19:00. There was no statistically significant variation in the monthly (p=0.105) or seasonal (p=0.270) distribution of burns. Bank holidays did not cause a statistically significant increase in numbers. Injury prevention strategies are likely to have most volume impact by increasing awareness of the peak time for burns in children, enabling parents at home with young children to modify any risky behaviour and by targeting older children and their behaviour.

Supernumerary intestinal muscle coat in a patient with Hirschsprung disease/Mowat-Wilson syndrome.

We present the 1st case report of an additional enteric smooth muscle layer in a patient with Mowat-Wilson syndrome and Hirschsprung disease. After resection of the aganglionic colon at the age of 5 months, our patient initially suffered from intermittent constipation, and subsequently by the age of 5 years, he developed ongoing diarrhea requiring medical treatment for more than a decade. Although the exact mechanism of abnormal gut motility in this case is unknown, we postulate that the supernumerary muscle and its associated neural plexus may be responsible for the patient's unusual late complication in treated Hirschsprung disease.