Infants, dogs and hot cars are a deadly combination. Especially in the summer.

Since 1996, 175 children have died of heat stroke after being left in parked cars, according to the National Safe Kids Campaign. The campaign wants to reduce that number and has launched a national awareness effort.

There have been no recent deaths or incidents in Lawrence involving children left in hot cars, according to John Drees, coordinator of Douglas County Safe Kids.

“It doesn’t happen very often, but it’s devastating and tragic when it does,” Drees said. “It’s a continuing education process, however, because you have new parents, new care-givers and new baby sitters.”

Children aren’t the only victims of hot cars. So are dogs. In Lawrence this year there had already been six incidents in which dogs had to be rescued from the interior of locked cars because of the heat, said Midge Grinstead, director of the Lawrence Humane Society.

“We have a lot of incidents every year,” Grinstead said.

Last summer Humane Society workers were called to a car parked downtown that had a puppy locked inside. By the time Lawrence Police arrived and got the car open the dog was so sick it had to be taken to a nearby barbershop, Grinstead said. The dog was placed in a sink until it could cool off enough to be taken to a veterinarian.

Two years ago two dogs in Douglas County died from the heat after being locked in cars, Grinstead said.

The most common excuse offered by guilty parents and dog owners was that they were only going to be gone 5 minutes, safety experts said.

¢National Safe Kids Campaign

It doesn’t take 90 degree temperatures to make the interior of a car an oven, safety experts said. Even with the outside temperature at 60 degrees a car’s interior could rapidly heat up, they said.

On a 95-degree day, however, the temperature inside a small car could exceed 120 degrees within 20 minutes, they said.

Even in normal temperatures under the right conditions people, especially children and the elderly, could succumb to heat exhaustion or heat stroke, said Paul Loney, a medical doctor in the emergency room at Lawrence Memorial Hospital.

Heat exhaustion was the less serious but more common affliction caused by overdoing an activity in the heat, Loney said. Heat stroke could disrupt many bodily functions, Loney said. Sweating, the body’s cooling mechanism, could stop functioning.

“Your system becomes overwhelmed,” Loney said. “Your brain goes haywire. Your kidneys don’t work right.”

Safe Kids organizations are passing out fliers at community events about the dangers of leaving children in overheated cars.

“You have to keep reminding people that just as you never, ever put an infant or a toddler in an oven, you don’t leave them in a hot car,” Drees said.