-     Children six and under account for the most of injuries

Consumers need to be careful when using a shopping cart as the number of safety accidents continues to rise at large retailers including discount stores and department stores.

The Korea Consumer Agency (President: Kim, Young-Seen, www.kca.go.kr) has recently conducted an analysis on 896 cases of safety accidents reported to the Consumer Injury Surveillance System (CISS) from 2006 to Sept., 2009 and found that 1) children six and under took up 48.8% of the injuries in total (in terms of age); and 2) injury accidents related to shopping cart and escalators including moving walk accounted for the half of injuries with 29.0% and 21.0%, respectively (in terms of injury accident type).

The KCA also conducted a research on safety warning labels at 13 large discount stores in the Seoul-Gyeonggi area and found that business should redouble efforts to prevent safety accidents to consumers. The research found only one store out of 11 stores used shopping carts with child seats with maximum weight limit of a child (15kg) being displayed in plain view.

Based on these results, the Agency plans to advise the Korea Chainstores Association (KOCA) to voluntarily take adequate precautions to prevent safety accidents (including warning label improvement at each facility) and continues to make suggestions to the Korean Agency for Technology and Standards (KATS) to improve shopping cart safety standards. Meanwhile, the Agency asks parents who accompanied their children to better supervise their children to prevent safety accidents during a trip to the supermarket.