Inspired To Heal
Stories of clinicians, educators, innovators, and researchers who built or led programs of excellence in government health institutions. Each guest has excelled in clinical medicine, program building, or public health. They persevered and succeeded through a clear vision, collaboration, and a passion for the mission of government-run health systems. Their stories will inspire those seeking change in their own organizations.
Inspired To Heal
Making Microwaves Safer: Preventing Childhood Burns
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Pediatrician Kyran Quinlan and occupational therapist Marla Robinson witnessed severe scald burns among young children in their hospital's burn unit. They embarked on an epidemiologic evaluation that turned into a near two-decades odyssey to improve microwave safety. They partnered with Underwriters Laboratory, the Consumer Products Safety Commission, impacted families, engineering and design students from Northwestern and University of Michigan to child-proof future microwave ovens. They describe the challenges and the thrill of eventually seeing safer ovens on store shelves.
Epilogue provided by Joe Musso, former Standards Program Manager at Underwriters Laboratory who was responsible for microwave standards.
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Additional guest information & links to podcast platforms are available at www.inspiredtoheal.net. Please like and follow us on your favorite platform.
Contact us with feedback and suggestions through the website.
Inspired to Heal, Season 2, Public Health Stories. In this season, we recount important public health advances. In each story, government agencies played critical roles. I'm really excited to hear from Marla Robinson, the Director of Inpatient Therapy Services at the University of Chicago, and Dr. Kyron Quinlan, former chair of General Pediatrics Division at Rush University Medical Center. I've been very impressed with the work that they've done in microwave safety and wanted to capture their story. So, Marla and Kyron, it's great to have you on the show and welcome to Inspired to Heal.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for having us.
SPEAKER_03Thanks, Bill. I'd like to start with Marla. And if you could describe to me the work that you did and the patients that you saw that made you interested in this work, what motivated this?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I um started my career at U of C. Part of the reason I went there was because they had a burn center. And my passion as an occupational therapist is treating pediatric and adult burn patients. I did a master's project, and Kyron was my supervisor for that, and that connected us. But what we were seeing was very young children who were coming into the burn center with scald-related and burn-related injuries from taking things out of the microwave once they'd been heated. And it really was causing a lot of functional and gar tissue and things like that that really will impact them for their life. And so that was part of the motivation for us to look at this particular concern and see what we could do about it.
SPEAKER_05We have pictures of a young, like a two-year-old girl who spilled ramen noodles down the front of her that were scalding hot. The acute picture is awful, but the follow-up picture of the scarring and keloid all across her front of her entire body, uh, her chest, her her abdomen. Kids have these burns on their faces and they they become part of who they are. So yeah, that's very motivating. Dr. Gottlieb, as the head of the burn unit, and Marla and I, we were discussing prevention. I think it probably did start off with her master's work, of how many different mechanisms of scald burns there are for kids. And most of the kids in the burn unit, which I think kids in the burn unit make up like 30 or 40% of all the people in the burn unit. And the majority of those kids are not there for fires. They're there for scalds. Those scalds happen in so many different mechanisms. It's really hard to think of a way to prevent them because you think like a toddler reaches up and grabs the handle of a boiling pot of water on the stove. That pot tips over, lands on top of that child. They are scalded because of that mechanism. Or there's a coffee pot with a cord dangling over the counter, and the child pulls on the cord and it pulls over that way. Or a 10-month-old is being held by the mom and she's got a hot cup of coffee, and the child has just the perfect gross motor skills to reach over and grab the mug, and now the child gets scalded for that reason. There's so many different mechanisms, but Dr. Gottlieb was feeling like, well, there is one mechanism where if we did this, maybe like, what if we made it harder for the two-year-olds to get into a microwave oven door? Just make the doors kind of child resistant. It seemed like that was that really had a chance.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Although it makes up a small fraction, or maybe, you know, less than the majority of the scald cases. It still was thousands of injuries, I think, that you were able to catalog over many years.
SPEAKER_05Aaron Powell Yeah, there was some work that uh Dr. Lowell did um looking at the burn unit data at the University of Chicago. She found basically it's like 10% of all the non-tapwater scalds were from this one mechanism. She led the another research project where we studied the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System to get a national estimate of this exact mechanism. And we found it's about 700 a year, about twice a day. There's a child that is treated in the emergency department in the United States for this specifically. And so over the course of all the years that the microwaves have been in our lives, yeah, there's thousands and thousands of kids who have had this happen to them.
SPEAKER_03And so when Dr. Gottlieb said, you know, we we can engineer the microwaves to make it safer. Did you have a timeline in mind? Did you think this is going to be an easy process?
SPEAKER_05Marla, what do you think? I think I feel like I remember being like crazy optimistic, like, oh my God, all we have to do is go talk to the microwave makers. They'll understand, and it's probably easy for them to fix.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, that's very true. And it wasn't the case. I mean, we we actually had to go back to the very beginning and we had to demonstrate who could, like what age children could do this at. And so that's where it actually started was we looked at typically developing children and looked at what they could do. And could they open two different kinds of microwaves, a push and a pull, and could they turn it on? And then could they remove something from the microwave oven? And what we found were that children as young as 17 months old could open both kinds of microwaves and could turn it on and could remove the contents. We even had some children younger than that that could do some of the components, but at 17 months they could do it all. And that was the impetus for us to go to the microwave manufacturers. Kyron can talk a little bit about how he connected with them because it's pretty amazing how that happened.
SPEAKER_05Marla led the study looking at all the typically developing children and how when do they acquire the abilities around microwaves to open the door, um, turn it on, pull something out, you know, do the things that would put them at risk of having these burns happen. But I'm thinking back on as we were wondering about when do kids acquire these skills, literally around that time, one of our three kids was two. He was two years old, and I was in another room and I heard our microwave oven go on. I heard the microwave that's on the countertop in our kitchen go on. I go in there, and our son John has pulled a little stool over to the microwave. He had stepped up on the stool, had put an apple in the microwave, and figured out what buttons to push to make it go on. He was heating up an apple for reasons I still don't understand. And so it was like we didn't have our data yet, but I knew two-year-olds probably could do some of this stuff already.
SPEAKER_03Did you get John in the lab when you when you created your I don't know that he cared about it?
SPEAKER_01He did not, but my children and all of our friends' children did.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I I I would think that having your child learn that skill, you might have some mixed feelings about being in that project.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, that's funny you say that. I remember Marla and I talking about like a little concern with like the institutional review board and the ethics of like, we're sort of teaching them how to do this, and we want to ensure that that doesn't lead to anything bad.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. One of the things that I read in your article was about the challenge that you had was parents did not feel like it was a product safety issue. They did not blame the the microwave manufacturers. It m felt like they should have had better supervision rather than we can design this more safely. You could speak to that, but I'm also very impressed that two clinicians decided let's attack this from a policy, uh regulatory perspective.
SPEAKER_05It uh it was a very interesting process. It was so interesting that burn units around the country, it seemed all knew about this exact mechanism. From Marla's community of burn unit people, people knew, like, oh yeah, ramen noodle soup, especially like in a microwave, and a little kid gets in there and they dump it on themselves and it spills and they get badly burned, is like a very well-known mechanism in all the burn units. But when we were working with the microwave makers, they literally had never heard of this. They didn't know. They no parent had ever complained. And I think parents perceive this as like, well, it did heat up the food, right? Like it's not like the thing malfunctioned, it's supposed to heat up food. And they might not have thought that there's any way that something else could have happened to make it safer for the child. But I do want to just emphasize, too, that you know, we we in burn prevention, you do education, you hand out pamphlets, you put up billboards, you do all this educational stuff. That's all it's these strategies that take the parent has to do something. It's an active strategy. And every cohort of young parents have to be taught. The idea of making a microwave safer is a passive strategy. It's like let's make the world safer. Caring parents now have it will have a chance to catch that this is happening. They'll have a little delay before anything really bad happens.
SPEAKER_03Could you speak a little bit to celebrate the infrastructure that we in the United States have developed with our public health systems? Could you speak to the role of government? And and I'll kind of cede this with the idea that the database run by the Consumer Product Safety Commission was instrumental in this work. But were there other government agencies and how did they benefit the work that she did?
SPEAKER_05You know, the Consumer Product Safety Commission does run this amazing simple surveillance system called the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. And it's a sample, uh a statistical sample of all emergency departments in the country. And there's about a hundred ERs in the sample, and it represents the entire country. So you can get national estimates based out of how frequently does anything come into the emergency rooms of these hundred hospitals. And it's very well designed and it's easily accessed. You can query it online, and so there's tons of really great stuff. That Consumer Product Safety Commission product has served a lot of people. It's been wonderful. There's also a person specifically there at the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Jonathan Midget, who is a PhD, and he is just this amazing person understanding the complexities of product regulation in the country, which is extremely complicated, I've now learned, and can translate it in ways that make it sort of accessible to people who are not product regulators by trade and help bridge the worlds so that people can interact with the world of product regulation and try to do what they're hoping to do.
SPEAKER_03Is that within the Department of Health and Human Services, or where do they sit in the federal government?
SPEAKER_05Its organization is unique. It's also unfortunately being threatened right now. There's five commissioners of the Consumer Products Safety Commission. And if I understand the news right, I think all five were removed. Whether the CPSC will continue, I think is a real question right now.
SPEAKER_03Do you know of other examples of work that was motivated by the CPSC, Consumer Product Safety Commission?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I know there's a ton of things with child safety. ATVs, the early ATV, remember there was a three-wheeled ATVs that were always flipping over and killing kids. They were behind that effort to make them all have to have four wheels. Tons of stuff with sleep-related infant death, crib safety, all the recalls. You know, the Consumer Product Safety Commission is kind of behind all the recalls for product safety for kids, a huge history of child safety.
SPEAKER_03Can you also speak to your training at the CDC? So you worked at as an epidemic intelligence service officer. Would this work have happened without that training?
SPEAKER_05You know, that training was absolutely huge to me. I'll just say out loud, you and I were in the same uh epidemic intelligence service class together. There was something like six weeks in the summer where we we were immersed in the world of from all the experts at CDC on every aspect of public health science, media, just really uh an amazing experience. And then I was assigned to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control and did uh did a lot of work on the epidemiology and prevention of motor vehicle-related injuries for kids. I I had a much broader and deeper set of skills when I came back to the University of Chicago after the EIS program. You know, with EIS, especially with outbreak stuff, it seemed like you absolutely better figure out how to interact with whoever is there. I know the history of EIS has, you know, interacting with farmers and foreign governments and local governments and people's personalities. And so there's a flexibility and a kind of an understanding, like you just have to figure that out to make it stop. That approach totally served with this effort to try to work with Underwriters Laboratories, which is the organization that holds the standard for microwaves. We had to work with the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The microwave makers themselves, they're in a business. They're profit is their main driver. And child safety is was not even on their radar before we started talking to them. So there's a ton of various perspectives that we had to navigate, and the EIS program definitely prepared me for that.
SPEAKER_03But you ended up having some microwave manufacturers support this initiative.
SPEAKER_05Aaron Ross Powell We did. We the first go-around, you know, this took two efforts to change the standard. And I'll just briefly mention that to change microwaves in the country, you have to change the standard. It's it's this written book of how everything about a microwave has to be. People know Underwriters Laboratories from the stamp UL that's on the side of boxes for many electronics. There's a standard that that all these products have to meet to get that stamp. Lahome Depot or Menards is not gonna sell one of these things unless it meets the standard. So that's the system that's in place for making sure the products are quality. The microwave standard, and it never had anything to do with how easy it is to open the door. And so we proposed to change the standard so it was harder for a kid to open the door. That uh initial attempt was in 2013. It it didn't pass, but we did have two yes votes, just two yes votes. The total group is was at the time something like 20 or 25 voting members, and it didn't pass. We had to try again. Um and Marla and I joined as voting members of the standards technical panel. So our two votes added and it ended up passing uh the second go-around ended up passing by one vote. And uh, but yeah, there was a little bit of support from the microwave makers, but a bunch of the microwave makers literally said in the comments in the first go-around, uh, people should watch their kids better. Like it's a supervision problem. And that's unfortunate. Attentive parents, this can happen to anybody because it's it's you don't even perceive this as a hazard. This is a the microwave never even gets hot. It's different than the stovetop. It's different than an oven. Um, it's not perceived the same way. And so people who are who are loving and caring for their children, this is a surprising thing that can happen to their child and it can have lifelong consequence.
SPEAKER_03Did the apple experiment make it into the testimony?
SPEAKER_05I don't know. I don't know. I don't think it has the profound like it's not Sir Isaac Newton's apple. Not quite that of it.
SPEAKER_03Or you weren't shooting an arrow through the apple. So Marley, this was gonna be a one-year master's thesis project, right?
SPEAKER_01Well, actually, this was after I had completed my master's. So this was this was kind of you know 2.0 on on how do we how do we change the world and how do we make things safer for for children in general. So but it was supposed to be a year. And you know, we started, you know, the discussions back in 2005, and we finally got it all figured out in 2023. And so it it took a really long time.
SPEAKER_03When you published, did you have the feeling that my work is done, we've done the research, we have this published, someone else can take this over? Or uh was it were you intrinsically motivated to, hey, I'm gonna see this through? I don't, it can't take 15 or 18 years, but eventually we'll get there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, I was probably a little naive to think that it could, it would just, you know, we we have the data, the data should speak for itself. But fortunately, Kyron is persistent and he really does a great job of networking, leveraging, and just talking to people about the importance of it. And so he he was the one that kept moving things along. And it was his insistence that that just helped us get where we ended up. But I think one of the other things that I thought was really interesting and was a really great initiative was that Kyron had reached out to um a group at Northwestern, and there were some engineering students at Northwestern, and they every year have to do a project and they have to design a project. And so he had submitted the can we have two separate and distinct actions to open a microwave as the project. We got invited to go and and view the product design that these this group of engineering students had put together. They were so creative and so innovative in what they came up with that that actually helped in some of our discussions with the microwave manufacturers to say it's possible. We've seen it. We've got engineering students out there who have shown us that this is something that can happen.
SPEAKER_05Can I just mention a couple things related to that? Is the idea of this passive mechanism and that push and turn, like on a pill bottle, it has a really cool history because there's a pediatrician from long ago at Duke named Jay Arena, who was in the hospital taking care of kids, and two of the kids were dying of aspirin ingestion. And he contacted the makers of St. Joseph's aspirin, and that is the exact brand that the kids had gotten into and and were they did die. And he had this conversation, was outraged, said, You have to do something. Your two children in my hospital are dying because of your product. And the response was quite positive. The owner felt like he should do something and he didn't know what to do, and they discussed the idea of I don't know, limiting the number of pills in the bottle, other ideas. And I guess Jay Arena, Dr. Arena, he finally said, why don't we just make it harder for the kids to get into the bottle? And so they settled on, let's think of designs that could do that. And the push and turn cap on pill bottles today are all a result of that. The world of ingestions and fatality from ingestions in kids is absolutely much better now because of that. It's dawned on me over all these years now that we in the clinical realm have such a unique perspective. We see the patterns because if you work in the ER, work in clinic, work in the burn unit, you see like, well, 10% of all of our skull burns of kids happen this one way. We can see the patterns. No family members or the microwave makers don't see it. Nobody else can see it. We have this one unique perspective. Because we have that, it's almost like we have a responsibility to do something about it. We're the only ones, if not us who would do this. There's nobody who's actually gonna get paid to do this, but we're the only ones that possibly could. I see you taking notes, Kyron. Is there something you I wanted to make absolutely sure that we get to add add Joe Musso into this conversation. Jonathan Midget at the Consumer Product Safety Commission basically introduced me to a guy named Joe Musso who tended to the microwave standard. He had a variety of jobs at Underwriters Labs. He very quickly understood what we were trying to do and seemed to believe in it quite strongly right off the bat. And he stuck with us this entire way. He guided me through understanding how the regulatory process works there, how the standards technical panel is comprised. And by the way, the standards technical panel is this group of many of them are microwave makers. So it's the regulation of microwaves largely is driven by the makers of microwaves. And that is a little concerning given there there's profit motive that drives them. And uh concerns like safety is it's not the first thing they think about. This work would never have happened without Joe Musso translating for us clinicians what is going on in the world of regulation and how does this even work. He was absolutely fantastic.
SPEAKER_03From a manufacturer's perspective, they're designing a microwave that's easy for adults to use. Not only just the design for the ease of use, but also the assembly line, the manufacturing facility. It's probably a tremendous expense for them. Only with a regulatory agency saying you have to do this that this would happen.
SPEAKER_05I think you're totally right. That was, I think their reluctance was a little bit in part based on this is actually a big deal for all their production plants. They'd have to reconfigure things and they needed us to nudge them to have to do this.
SPEAKER_01And one of the other things that that did come up, and I think it was a real concern for a lot of people, was when we think about who uses microwaves, it's a lot of our elderly population. And they have a lot of chronic conditions, arthritis, some cognitive things that come along with it as well. And so by making these recommendations, were we also putting them at risk for not being able to do their self-care activities and be as independent as possible, right? Because maybe a microwave, you know, using a microwave is safer than using a stovetop when we think about meal preps. Could they take something from the fridge, put it in the microwave, and then they've got a you know, a put-together meal? We did field questions related to that as well. The answer to that is they're equally at risk that the children are in terms of their ability to remove something and the strength that it takes to remove something safely. So there is that component too, but but that was certainly something, you know, could they do two separate and distinct actions? And I think the microwave makers did a really great job of coming up with some solutions that made that possible.
SPEAKER_03Increasingly, as I interact with technology, I can imagine, you know, you might need a laboratory with people like me to see if I could actually operate the microwave, you know, after you design the safety features. Yep. We've talked a lot about the role of the clinician, a role of Underwriters Laboratory, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Could you speak to the role of either community or patients in the work that you did or the testimony that you gave?
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Actually, I'm glad you just brought this up. You know, we had all these data. We had published reports that we had created, we had statistics. It seemed like that only went so far. Like the people on the other side of the table were human. And they were largely producers of microwaves. And they did not know what Marla knows. They had never seen a kid who is crying and who needs surgery, skin graph surgery, and then in the unit with tubes and you know what I mean? They didn't know that. They were never a parent that had that happen. And they never even heard of it before we started. So we created a video of one kid. We created a video of the story of one kid. And David Morazic, who's like this extremely talented uh video person who runs the shop at Rush, we were able to locate one specific child who several years prior had had this had this burn, but he actually still remembered when it happened. And he had a scar because of it, and he and his family sat on the couch at their home, and David created this video. And the story, I have this, it's taught me so much that statistics can change people's minds, but stories change people's hearts. The humans on the other side of the table that we were trying to convince of the need for this, it seemed to me like it was it was like a magical effect. Like now they saw a kid. Now they saw a family, now they saw like the scar on the kid. And his explanation that he remembers that when the scald occurred, when the liquid hit his chest, that it felt like a torch had hit him. And his mom heard the screams from the other room. It's just the details become it's like real now. It's not just a table, a figure, or something in a paper. It's like a real person. And I think it it changed their perception of this and their appreciation of this and what's driving us, and how come we're not stopping? And because we keep seeing this, and they have the opportunity to do something to protect kids better in the future. And I think it helped.
SPEAKER_03And Marla, in this 18-year journey, you probably treated numerous scald injuries that you saw could have been prevented. And I imagine working with those children helped to motivate these efforts.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. And and every time, every time we would have someone, a patient come in from that mechanism, we would talk to the families and we would let them know that we were working on trying to make a difference on their behalf so that it wouldn't happen to somebody else again. And that that in and of itself was incredibly gratifying that we were really trying to change the impact long-term so that future children would not be impacted by this burn injury.
SPEAKER_03And you probably remove the emotional burden of feeling responsible for this to this is not your fault. It's a a product design that can be improved.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I think that really that that helps parents. I mean, there's there's so much that that happens around a burn injury. There's guilt, there's blame, there's, you know, all sorts of things. And at the end of the day, accidents happen. And that's why they call them accidents, right? You can't have your eyes on your child all the time. That's just what happens. So if we could change, change the way that they're made, make it harder for them to be able to access it, turn it on. I mean, they want to be like their parents. They see their parents preparing meals and taking care of their family, and they want to mimic those behaviors. And so they then pull up the chair to the microwave that's on the counter, probably at an appropriate height. And then they try to do all of those things.
SPEAKER_03If I were to buy a microwave from a big box retailer, would I be buying one that now has these safety features? Yes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_05It's fascinating. This, I think this passed in it was supposed to be March of 2023, is when it was supposed to be like that's the the final date or whatever where like it's gonna happen. And I kept going back to uh the big box appliance stores and checking. And I never saw it. I looked online, I never saw stuff. I kept checking with Underwriters Labs. Like, when is this actually gonna happen? The microwave makers had had requested a delay for a whole nother year that was approved, and then could sell out of their existing inventory from the old kind of microwaves. And literally, maybe a month ago now, about a month ago, I went to Menards. And if anybody is listening to your podcast that doesn't have a Menards, it's a Home Depot type of store, it's Midwestern, I think. But anyway, I go down the microwave aisle and I find the first microwave I've ever seen at one of these stores that has a sticker specifically addressing the new safety standards to prevent child burns and all about this work that Marlon and I have been up to for all these years. I almost broke down in the Menards microwave aisle because it was so cool.
SPEAKER_03As a lifelong Cubs fan, if you if you could you compare that to the 2016 World Series?
SPEAKER_05Uh it was very similar, actually.
SPEAKER_01The other the other piece that went along with this work that we haven't talked about yet was there was a sticker that was needed to be placed on the inside of the microwave as well that talked about the risk. That was another piece that we were we were really happy to see that they were putting it on there. So again, highlighting the fact to anybody that was buying a microwave that there are inherent risks to this type of device in your home. And so that was the other piece we haven't talked about, but it was, I thought was an important part.
SPEAKER_03So if you could look out into the future, I'm sure you're both very interested in seeing the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System data. When do you anticipate we'll see a decrease in skull? Do you think it's gonna take 10 years, 15 years?
SPEAKER_05I think it's gonna be slow because the microwaves don't seem to break down very frequently. And we need them to be replaced with the new kind. It's gonna take time, but eventually the existing fleet of microwaves that are out there, when they are replaced, they'll be getting replaced with a safer microwave and kids will be safer.
SPEAKER_03And would you advise new parents, parents of young children, to get one of these and replace their old microwave?
SPEAKER_05Marla, what would you say? I would I would say yes.
SPEAKER_01I would say yes. I mean, I would say do that. I would say always use a mug that has a secured lid on it that has to, you know, you have to push and move it over to open it. I whenever you're holding your child or around your child so that if something spills over, it doesn't hurt them. I would I would really think differently about how you observe your environment and and approach what you do.
SPEAKER_03And now my final question. If you could choose one item, literal or figurative, to put in your public health bag, what would it be?
SPEAKER_05It's like a translator. Because for this work with the microwaves, we needed to translate between the worlds of medicine and the worlds of regulation and the worlds of the microwave manufacturers. Related to that is the making of that video, which I think translated our concern for the kids and need to prevent these for the microwave makers to understand the issue. We speak in one language that is science and statistics and data, and that doesn't translate to some segments of the population. You kind of need to see the suffering of a child. You can't show that easily on a table or a figure. So translating what we do in a way that that will be received well can help to move public health.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think Kyron said it well, but I would say collaboration is really what made this a success story. It was the medical team, and it included nurses, physicians, and therapists. So everybody's knowledge and expertise at the forefront of patient care. It took the family and the patient to be able to share their story that allowed us to share their story broadly, both in print as well as in video form. It required us to work with several different agencies: Consumer Product Safety Commission, Kids in Danger, UL, Underwriters Laboratory, the microwave manufacturers. So industry required us to work collaboratively with all of them as well. And that's what made the difference. In addition to persistence, I mean, took us a really long time, but the outcome was certainly well worth it.
SPEAKER_03So put a translator and collaboration into the public health bag. Thank you both very much. I really enjoyed this and I appreciate you taking the time to share this story with me. Thanks, Bill.
SPEAKER_05I'm glad you were uh wanting us to talk with you about it.
SPEAKER_03After talking with Kyron and Marla, I spoke with Joe Musso, a former program manager with Underwriters Laboratory. Joe, it appears that a large part of your career was spent working with Kyron and Marla on microwave safety.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I know it went on for a long time. It was a situation where different forces needed to come together, but the key was convincing the industry folks that there was enough of a problem to get on board with coming up with a solution. Once we got more of the data together, more people involved with CPSC, with the industry, and with Kyron and Marla in particular, that's when we had more success. So it was long and difficult, but we're all very proud of the outcomes. I would point to this personally as one of the proudest efforts that I was involved in. There's a handful of safety changes that make a big difference. This is one of them. I would compare it to the photo eyes on your garage door, what sends the door back if there's an obstruction, automatic fire sprinklers. Those are the types of things when you get to the finish line, you know it's going to make a big difference. CPSC, they'll take the initiative to do some research. It's not just them sitting in a meeting. They have the ability, at least currently, to take that a step further if they feel that there's a priority issue that they want to address. Kyron and Marla, their calmness and their hunger for knowing more about the process, I think those were probably two of the attributes that allowed them to be successful.
SPEAKER_00Inspired to Heal podcasts are for informational purposes only and should not be considered as health or professional advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of the host or the guest's current or past employers.
