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Last week, a small fire at a high-rise hotel in the main tourist district of Bangkok, Thailand caused the upper floors to become filled with smoke, killing at least one foreign tourist and injuring 23 others.

When firefighters arrived at the 15-story Grand Park Avenue Bangkok hotel last Thursday evening, they saw people screaming for help from the upper floors. The smoke had risen so quickly and had gotten so thick that “people were panicked and some of them wanted to jump from windows. We had to tell them to wait and we sent cranes in to help,” said a local fire chief.

One foreign woman who suffered from smoke inhalation was unconscious when taken from the building and later died at a Bangkok hospital. It can take just two or three breaths of smoky air that contains carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide to cause permanent injury to the brain, heart and lungs, and even death.

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Several weeks back, a few unattended candles sparked a fire that caused about $130,000 in damage and caused more than 40 people to be evacuated from an apartment building in Seattle, Washington.

The fire started at just before 4 a.m., according to the Seattle Fire Department. Firefighters responding to the scene had to use a ladder to rescue a woman who had already become trapped in her second floor unit. Once she was rescued, it took them another 30 minutes to knock down the fire.

The evacuated residents waited inside a city bus as the firefighters fought the blaze. By about 6 a.m., all but two of them were able to return to their homes. Those two residents, a man and a woman, were being helped by American Red Cross.

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In mid-February, the following product safety recall was voluntarily conducted by Bosch Security Systems of Fairport, NY, in cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. Consumers should stop using this product immediately unless otherwise instructed. It is illegal to attempt to resell a recalled consumer product.

The name of the Bosch product is the Fire Alarm Control Panel. The fire alarm panel is a locking red wall box with dimensions of 22.7 inches high by 14.5 inches wide by 4.3 inches deep. The status, date and time can be seen through a glass screen on the panel door. The word BOSCH is printed on the right corner of the panel and the model number FPA-1000-UL is printed on the bottom left below the glass screen. The alarm panels featured software versions 1.10, 1.11 and 1.12, which can be determined by installers. These units were designed to be used in small to medium-sized facilities, in both public and residential buildings. These were sold at authorized distributors and installers nationwide from May 2009 through October 2011. They were manufactured in China.

About 330 units are being recalled because when the “alarm verification” feature of the system is turned on, the control panel could fail to sound an alarm if a fire occurs. In addition, on systems with 50 or more reporting stations, a delay in sounding an alarm and reporting a fire might occur if the loop for the alarm system is broken.

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In late February, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, in cooperation with Carlisle FoodService, announced a voluntary recall of the following consumer products. Consumers should stop using recalled products immediately. Also, it is illegal to attempt to resell a recalled consumer product.

The type of product being recalled is beverage cups and mugs. About 111,000 units are targeted by the recall. The importer of these cups and mugs is Carlisle FoodService Products of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

The danger related to these cups and mugs is that they can break when they come in contact with hot liquids, posing a threat of serious burns to consumers. Carlisle has received three reports of cups and mugs breaking during use with hot liquid. No injuries were reported, however.

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Is a medical condition in which a blood clot forms in a deep vein in the body. Most of the blood clots happen in the large veins in the lower leg and thigh. These clots can block the veins leading to restricted blood flow or may break off and move through the circulatory system leading to serious problems depending on which organ is affected. A DVT may cause pulmonary embolism if it goes to the lung, it may cause heart attack if it goes to the heart or it may cause a stroke if it goes to the brain.

Deep venous thrombosis may be caused by:

  • Factors that cause change in the blood velocity.
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A geriatric is a person who is older than 65 years. The geriatric population is increasing in developed countries due to the improvement of services and quality of life.

Flames and scalds are the leading cause of burns in geriatrics. Risk factors that may contribute to burn injury in elderly people include:

  • Living alone.
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In late February, a man suffered third degree burns from an unusual incident involving an overheated laptop computer. His burns were so severe that he had to be airlifted to a top burn treatment center for further care, including skin graft procedures to replace badly burned skin.

The 31-year-old man suffered burns on 60 percent of his body. The cause of his injuries was a fire that started in the bedroom from an overheated laptop computer which was left on while he took a shower. The victim was injured because he made a careless decision: He placed his laptop computer on the mattress of his bed before going into the shower. Laptop computers get hot when they are on, and their cooling and ventilation areas are near the bottom of the unit. So laptops must always be placed on a hard surface so that they can take in air to cool them off. In this instance, the heat from the computer was trapped, and eventually set the mattress on fire.

When the victim realized that the mattress and the bed were on fire, he tried to put it out with the help of his wife. Unfortunately for him, in his attempt to extinguish the fire, he suffered severe burns on his hands, arms, and legs. The fire was finally extinguished by a team of firemen who rushed to the scene after receiving a distress call from someone outside the home.

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Here is a story that shows clearly why, if a fire breaks out in your home, you should get out immediately and call 911 to report the fire, rather than stay inside and try to extinguish the fire yourself. In short: Unforeseen dangers can arise, and they can kill you.

In mid-February in San Francisco, investigators who reviewed last year’s house fire in the Diamond Heights district that killed two city firefighters issued a set of safety recommendations aimed at preventing a similar tragedy in the future.

A sudden flare-up in the burning house, fueled by oxygen coming in from a broken window, caused the deaths of the two firefighters. The men died even though they did not commit any procedural errors, San Francisco fire officials said.

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Rather than creating traditional landfills, U.S. military personnel have burned tons of trash and human waste while stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But some veterans now believe that their present health problems are the result of breathing in the polluted fumes and smoke that came from those burn pits.

Legislation filed in November in the U.S. Congress would direct the Department of Veterans Affairs to create a registry for veterans who might have been exposed to these burn pits during the wars involving the U.S. between 2001 and 2011. The database would allow the government to collect information on the number of veterans exposed to the burn pits and the types of health problems they are suffering. However, it doesn’t direct the government to provide any particular type of benefits to those veterans.

“Is there a really consistent pattern of a problem, of is it more a coincidence?” said one member of Congress. “We’ve seen anecdotally what appears to be some pretty weird symptoms that just turned up from nowhere” among soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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