A new studyshows that choking deaths among children are really a more serious problem than was previously thought and that the death rate is quite high, even among kids who were considered “old enough” for more complicated toys.

The data shows that 2.7 million kids, with an average age of 3.5, were admitted to hospitals with airway obstructions caused by an object. 42% of the foreign bodies were food items, the rest were “inorganic” objects such as toys. This is apparently “weird.”

“Toys are affecting older kids, and that’s really weird to me,” Dr. Rahul Shah, a pediatric otolaryngologist at the Children’s National Medical Center and the study’s co-author, told AOL News.

The death rate is apparently quite shocking, says Dr. Shah.

“The death rate, to me, is unbelievable,” he told AOL News. “It just shows that choking is absolutely not a benign health issue, but an extremely serious one.”

In case you’d like to take some steps to prevent your child from dying, the article recommends paying particular care to the now-controversial hot dog, which is responsible for 17% of all choking emergency room visits.

If you were to take the best engineers in the world and try to design the perfect plug for a child’s airway, it would be a hot dog,” Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, wrote in a statement. “I’m a pediatric emergency doctor, and to try to get them out once they’re wedged in, it’s almost impossible.”

Kid Chokings Still ‘Extremely Serious’ Problem [AOLNews via Consumer Reports]

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