Second Hand or Cheap Electrical Goods

[RFESC]

Hi all

I’m getting in touch on behalf of the Electrical Safety Council – the UK charity dedicated to reducing electrical accidents and deaths in the home. Electrical accidents currently kill around one person every week in their home and injure 350,00 a year.

We’re currently running a campaign about faulty electrical goods and we need your help. Have you or a family member ever bought second hand or cheap electrical goods online or at a market stall and run into problems? Perhaps the product didn’t work, overheated, or even caught fire. If so – we’d love to speak to you. If we use your story you could get a reward.

Contact me with details at ***** *****.co.uk

 

[mattylad]

Electrical accidents currently kill around one person every week in their home and injure 350,00 a year.

Hello Rachel, have you got some web published proof of this please?

What I am hearing on here is that it it far far less.

 

[securespark]

http://www.esc.org.uk/public/news-a...poses-millions-to-serious-electrical-dangers/

 

[PrenticeBoyofDerry]

Hi all
Have you or a family member ever bought second hand or cheap electrical goods online or at a market stall and run into problems?

No
There is my input.
Unless you are talking about a problem getting it home on the back of a push-bike?

 

[PrenticeBoyofDerry]

http://www.esc.org.uk/public/news-a...poses-millions-to-serious-electrical-dangers/

Is that down to faulty goods though?

 

[securespark]

Dunno.

Just a stab at where Rachel got her figures.

 

[ban-all-sheds]

From the NICEIC Business Development Manager, of course, where else?

 

[Taylortwocities]

Electrical accidents currently kill around one person every week in their home and injure 350,00 a year.

How many is 350,00? Should that read 350,000?

Really a third of a million people killed or injured a year? That cannot be right or government would have introduced some legislation that addressed the issue of electrical safety.
I haven't noticed them doing that, as yet

 

[ban-all-sheds]

Hello Rachel, have you got some web published proof of this please?

What I am hearing on here is that it it far far less.

It is far less.

She is making it up.

I wonder what vested interests there would be here?

 

[JohnW2]

Electrical accidents currently kill around one person every week in their home ....

That is (perhaps surprisingly) way above all the officially-available figures, and I would suspect that only a very small proportion of the very few deaths that do occur have got anything to do with second hand or cheap electrical goods. Reliable figures for non-fatal 'injuries' due to electrical accidents are not really available, since most such injuries are very minor and do not come to any 'official' attention - figures one see quoted derive from (usually very small) surveys, and therefore have to be regarded with considerable caution.

Kind Regards, John

 

[JohnD]

She appears to have an email address at this PR company

http://www.forster.co.uk/services/pr/

 

[JohnW2]

Electrical accidents currently kill around one person every week in their home and injure 350,00 a year.

How many is 350,00? Should that read 350,000? Really a third of a million people killed or injured a year? That cannot be right or government would have introduced some legislation that addressed the issue of electrical safety.

She appears to be quoting a mish-mash of data from the most recently published ESC figures which can be seen here.

For 2007, they quote 19 deaths certfied as due to electrocution "in home or leisure" - so the "in the home figure" must have been 19 or below. She presumably is adding in the 2007 deaths due to 'fires of electrical origin'. If one excludes those due to "misuse" and "articles too close to heat", that leaves 23 deaths in which the fire was attributed to (electrical) 'fault'. So, a maximum of 19+23 = 42 deaths in 2007 - which I suppose is not that much less than "1 per week".

As for injuries, the ESC quote 2.5million mains voltage electrical shocks of which 350,000 resulted in 'serious injury'. The former (2.5m) figure derives from a survey of 809 people (hopefully a frandom sample) in 2010 - persumably indicating (if one assumes populatioin of ~60m) that about 34 of those 809 surveyed people had suffered a mains-voltage electric shock in the preceding year. The latter (350,000) figure derives from a survey of unstated sample size in 2011. Make of those what you will. Goodness knows how they define 'serious injury' - FWIW, I can tell you that 'serious injuries' due to electric shock are very rare as reasons for presentation to UK A&E departments, so I do wonder about their definition of a 'serious injury'.

It's interesting that, dependent upon the nature of their interest, people campaigning in this area attempt to imply that many of the deaths/injuries are due to whatever they are campaigning about (be that 'DIY electrical work', 'unsafe plugs/leads/socket covers/whatever', 'secondhand or cheap electrical goods', or whatever) - whereas the truth presumably is that none of those factors are, in themselves, responsible for more than a small proportion (if any) of the total (which, in terms of deaths, is very small),

Kind Regards, John

 

[stillp]

I was studying some NHS statistics for electrical accidents that led to patients presenting at A & E a while ago, and discovered a toddler who had apparently had 3 electrical accidents on the same day. This turned out to be the same child, same incident, but reported by the receptionist, triage nurse, and the doctor who treated the child.

Oh and the actual "electrical accident"? The child had pushed a button cell up their nose.

 

[JohnW2]

I was studying some NHS statistics for electrical accidents that led to patients presenting at A & E a while ago,

Yes, I've dealt with a lot of such statsitics over the years, both in relation to their generation, collection and analysis.

.... and discovered a toddler who had apparently had 3 electrical accidents on the same day. This turned out to be the same child, same incident, but reported by the receptionist, triage nurse, and the doctor who treated the child.

That's obviously a failure of the data collection process, but such things are quite common. There is also often a failure to take into account repeat attendances. Some people will re-attend an A&E department (or, worse, a number of different A&E departments) several times in relation to the same injury, and the data collection can make this look like separate incidents. And, of course, although fairly trivial, the 'serious' injury figures (from A&E records) will often include those who subsequently die (data usually from death certification records) - hence 'double-counted'.

Oh and the actual "electrical accident"? The child had pushed a button cell up their nose.

That's another major problem. Although there have been consdierable advances, the coding systems used for diseases/injuries are very 'coarse' when it comes to things like this - so I'm not at all surprised that the button cell incident got recorded as an 'electrical accident'. If one starts delving, a lot of the 'electrical accidents' are actually 'mechanical' ones caused by electrically-powered tools and appliances.

It's worse when one gets to the surveys used to estimate electrical shock/incidence rates, since one is to a large extent at the mercy of the subjectivity of the respondents. We see quite a few messages in the forum about 'tingles/shocks' experienced by touching all sorts of things, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if a good few of these exist amongst the 2.5m per year estimated 'mains voltage electric shocks'. I really am very sceptical about the 350,000 per year 'serious injuries' due to electric shock - that is in a totally different ballpark from my experience and any A&E statistics I've ever seen - so, as I said, brings into question the definition of 'serious' being utilised.

As I'm sure I've said before, the thing which has never ceased to amaze me is the very low level of fatal (or, I would have said, 'genuinely serious') injuries genuinely due to electricity.

Kind Regards, John

 

[dimstthomas]

http://www.forster.co.uk/case-studies/electrical-safety-council/

The "Home Electrical Safety Check app" link takes you to

http://www.esc.org.uk/public/news-a...risking-lives-with-basic-electrical-blunders/

Which quotes:

"The research from ESC reveals a dangerous level of ignorance about the perils of electricity in UK households. In the past year, almost one million people have repaired an appliance while it is still plugged in; despite the fact this can result in a fatal or serious injury. Other electrical ‘confessions’ included knowingly using faulty plugs or sockets (12.2 million people), ignoring burning smells coming from an appliance or socket (1.5 million people) and trailing cables near hot surfaces or cookers (2 million people)."