SUMMER is the prime season for bicycle spoke injuries. These nasty, painful and entirely avoidable accidents can disrupt a child's summer and seriously damage their ankles and feet, with healing sometimes taking months.
Two thirds of all such accidents occur between June and September with the peak in July: the average age of children hurt is four years.
The accidents usually occur among young children riding as passengers on adult bicycles, most often on the cross bar but also on the handlebars and the carrier. As the children dangle their tender legs, their feet and ankles get caught in the rapidly moving metal spokes, resulting in bruising and superficial abrasions at best - and at worst skin loss, deep lacerations and even fractures. The wounds can take weeks to heal and sometimes need plastic surgery.
At Temple Street Hospital in Dublin, orthopaedic surgeons carried out a study of all the 71 bicycle spoke injuries they saw in one year - 44 boys and 27 girls. The youngest patient was 20 months old and the oldest was 13 years old.
Some 95 per cent of bicycle spoke injuries occur while the child is riding as a passenger on the adult bicycle of someone old enough to know better. "None of the bicycles had a spoke guard and nearly 90 per cent of the accidents occurred with the parent or relative as the main rider - a sad indictment of the state of accident prevention education and the common sense of parents," the Temple Street team wrote in an article published in Foot & Ankle International (Vol. 17, No 3).
There are three ways in which these accidents usually occur: lacerations of the tissue from the knife like action of the bicycle spokes; crushing from impingement between the wheel and the fork of the bicycle and shearing injury from a combination of both these forces.
Bicycle spoke injuries could be prevented if manufacturers were to supply bicycles already fitted with hard plastic mesh guards between the nine and 12 o'clock positions on the wheels, the Temple Street team said. But anyone wanting to buy spoke guards has a problem: in a rough survey by this column of three large bike shops in Dublin, none of the salesmen had heard of spoke guards, except as part of a rear carrier.
More than one in four of the spoke injuries seen at Temple Street occurred when the child was sitting in the rear wheel frame. Good quality child carriers with "foot guards" incorporated (Raleigh's version costs £49) are the only way to safely carry a child. "Foot guards" can be bought separately (£1.50).
Don't forget those bicycle helmets (£15.95 upwards). Accident and Emergency consultants have warned again and again that, in order to receive a fatal head injury, children and adults have only to hit their head on the ground upon falling from even a slow moving bicycle. One bike shop owner commented how irresponsible it is that parents will spend £400 on a bike and skimp on the helmet. One person dies on a bicycle in Ireland every week.