California State law requires children under the age of four and children under 40 pounds to travel in a car safety seat. Thanks to a grant from the California State AAA, OUTREACH vehicles will be equipped with new car seats for customers of the GRHP who do not have their own car seats available. Thank you CSAAA!
Proper installation of car seats is essential. Experts estimate that 80 percent of child seats are installed improperly and that 60 percent of children in fatal crashes are not belted in at all. On December 17,1999 OUTREACH staff and drivers received extensive training about properly installing the new car seats in OUTREACH vehicles. The training was provided by CSAAA and the Lucile Packard Children's Health Services at Stanford. The training was excellent and held at MACSA in San Jose, another recipient of CSAAA car seats.
For more information about car safety, look at the website for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration at: http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov and find "Child Passenger Safety" as one of the topics.
Two recent articles focus on child passenger
saftey: take a look at the links below to the SF Chronicle and
Time Magazine:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/02/10/MN70478.DTL
http://www.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/articles/0,3266,38432,00.html