Three young children were unhurt Wednesday after being left in their parents’ vehicles in the broiling heat.An 18-month-old girl left alone in her mother’s locked car in the Petah Tikva area for two hours in the morning was in good condition at the city’s Schneider Children’s Medical Center. She was treated in the emergency department and hospitalized for observation.In the Beersheba area, people saw another child in a car and saved him before the car got too hot.United Hatzalah reported a third child left in a car on Wednesday: a two-year-old girl who was locked in her family car in Ramat Gan.United Hatzalah volunteer Nati Berger said he had arrived soon after the call came in, but by then passersby had broken the window and managed to remove her in good condition. She was taken to a nearby hospital for examination.The medical organization appealed to drivers not to leave young children in cars even for a moment – especially in such hot weather.Schneider emergency department head Prof.Yehezkel Weisman said that every year, especially in the late spring and throughout the summer, small children suffer injury or die when parents or others leave them in locked vehicles. The interior temperature of such vehicles can reach 60° to 80° Celsius, depending on the heat outside – especially in record-high temperatures like Wednesday’s.Babies and toddlers, said Weisman, are much more vulnerable to irreversible hyperthermia (heat stroke) and the collapse of bodily systems.Since 2008, there have been 319 cases of youngsters being left alone in vehicles – a total of 349 children. Of these, 16 ended in death.A total of 62 percent were boys, and 67% were Jewish. The most frequent ages were zero to four years old, accounting for 84% of these cases. The majority were left in private cars, but 11% were in vans that other adults were driving, 4% were on buses, and 1% were in light rail cars.
