Nail Gun Injuries Not Reported to Consumers
June 30th, 2008 amy
Newly disclosed federal documents show that engineers at the Consumer Product Safety Commission privately warned nail gun makers back in 2002 that the industry needed to do something about the number of nail gun injuries; yet somehow, this information was never passed along to consumers.
McClatchy News reports that CPSC engineer Caroleene Paul, who wrote the 14-page report and forwarded it to the agency’s Office of Hazard Identification and Reduction, didn’t offer any explanation. The Sacramento Bee reportedly obtained a copy of the report from the consumer protection agency under the Freedom of Information Act, only after threatening legal action.
Based on nail gun tests and interviews with injury victims, the report was among 250 pages of internal commission documents about nail gun injuries and trends from 2002 to 2007. Other documents included details of a nail gun death in 2006, four years after Paul’s report.
Duke University researcher Hester Lipscomb, who has studied nail gun injuries for a decade, said she was disturbed by the consumer agency’s inertia after the 2002 report, because its engineers and the nail gun industry group clearly were aware that tools equipped with automatic “contact-trip” firing systems were hurting and killing people.
Federal hospital data show the number of patients hospitalized with injuries caused by nail guns was 42,000 in 2005, compared to 12,982 injured in 2000.
