Under the headline “Health scare of the week,” an item in the Aug. 19 edition of the national news magazine “The Week” says there’s been an uptick in visits to the nation’s emergency wards due to trampoline mishaps. The item declared that “Trendy trampoline parks are proliferating across the continent – five or six new ones open each month – and so are serious injuries among children who visit them to flip into foam pits, bounce their way to a slam dunk, or play dodgeball.”
The item went on to claim that 6,932 trips to the ER in 2014 resulted from accidents at one of North America’s 460-plus trampoline parks (they based this on research collected by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission – saying that’s a 12-fold increase over 2010).
Backyard setups are still responsible for the vast majority of an overall 91,000 trampoline injuries, the report continued. NPR.com quoted another source — an ER doctor at Texas Children’s Hospital named Katherine Leaming-Van Zandt – who claimed that about one out of five trampoline park injuries are suffered by adults.