Smartphone chargers can cause electrocution and serious injuries

Cellphones have all the capacity to distract and they are surely not the best bedfellows. Apart from keeping you awake, a new research has claimed that bringing the smartphones to bed, can actually shock you. The report has mentioned about people who were accidentally electrocuted and burned by phone chargers.

Study author, Dr. Carissa Bunke a pediatric resident physician with the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor said, “A charger relies on the contained transfer of a certain amount of electrical current”. But if the electrical transfer is not properly contained, the unsuspected phone users might get shocked, burned and in some cases hospitalized. Bunke’s team had highlighted a case in point where a 19 year old woman who had sought care at an ER (emergency room) when she experienced neck pain and burning after going to sleep.

While in bed, the patient had inadvertently lay on top of a USB-charging cord meant for an Apple iPhone. The cord was an inexpensive off-brand type and the patient had left it plugged in to the outlet, despite the fact that the live charging end was not actually plugged in to her phone at the time. The live end had come into contact with a long metal necklace the woman was wearing. This had triggered a sudden burning sensation along with severe pain around the neck of the patient.

The study author added that in most of the cases a shock or a burn would only slightly damage the top layer of the skin and could be addressed at home or at urgent care. In more serious cases , like the second degree burns, it penetrates to the second layer of the skin and could cause externally visible injuries that can require procedures like skin grafts. In this case, the doctors had noticed that the electrical current of the charger had burned almost a perfect circle around the neck of the patient. As the burn is caused by electricity, the shock can be painful.

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