A recent Consumer Reports magazine article claiming a number of infant car seats "failed disastrously" during side-impact crash tests has been withdrawn after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration called into question the testing conditions used for the report.
   In a statement, the NHTSA said the Consumer Reports testing procedures showed a "significant error in the manner in which the tests were conducted and reported."
   Consumer Reports initially reported that it would recommend only two of the 12 infant car seats it tested under circumstances intended to simulate a side-impact crash of just 38.5 miles per hour. But when the NHTSA tried to replicate the tests - which had sent some seats flying out of their bases upon impact, according to the magazine - the agency determined that such failures could not have been produced at the claimed test speed of 38 mph.
    "The organization's data show its side-impact tests were actually conducted under conditions that would represent being struck in excess of 70 mph, twice as fast as the group claimed," stated the NHTSA. "When NHTSA tested the same child seats in conditions representing the 38.5 mph conditions claimed by Consumer Reports, the seats stayed in their bases as they should, instead of failing dramatically."
   For all seats sold in the United States, the NHTSA conducts frontal-impact tests at 30 mph.
   Claudio Romo, an Injury Prevention manager at Children's Medical Center Dallas, said her office was flooded with calls from concerned parents in the days after the original article appeared in the February issue of Consumer Reports.
   "The reaction was awful," Romo said. "We are trying hard to improve car safety for children, and here's something that says infant car seats simply don't work."
   Romo found it particularly interesting that Consumer Reports never revealed its testing protocol when issuing its findings.
   "To say the seats failed, they may have, but we have no way of knowing what they were doing to the seats," Romo said. "Were they the same as the federal standards that are in place? No one had enough information available to say for sure."

Click here to read the Consumer Reports retraction.
Click here to read the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's response to the retraction, as well as to view crash-test footage.

Vehicle accidents and children
   Motor vehicle crashes remain the leading cause of unintentional injury-related death among children ages 14 and under. Each year, nearly 1,600 child occupants ages 14 and under die in motor vehicle crashes and close to 228,000 are injured as occupants in motor vehicles.
   As the state's only pediatric Level I trauma center, Children's gathers statistics on the types of injury cases that come through the hospital's doors. Doctors on the Children's medical staff treated more than 1,500 children for injuries sustained in motor-vehicle collisions last year - 30 of whom died as a result of their injuries.
   An effort to reduce those numbers is under way in the Texas Legislature, where lawmakers have introduced new legislation that would increase the age and size of children required to be in safety seats.