For just a few dollars and a couple of minutes in the microwave, instant ramen makes an easy lunch or tasty snack.
But even a minor spill can cause serious third-degree burns.
Injuries caused by scalding soup accounted for nearly 40 percent of all burns treated at Oklahoma Children’s Hospital in recent years.
And at the University of Chicago Burn Center, 31 percent of serious burns over a decade were caused by a seemingly innocuous cup of soup.
Now, doctors in the burn unit are warning that just half a second of contact with boiling water can cause serious damage that could take the child to the emergency room.
Microwave-prepared instant ramen is heated to 300 degrees, well beyond the boiling point. Less than half a second of contact with liquid at this temperature can cause third-degree burns.
The warnings come at the start of a new school year, when millions of children will fill their lunch boxes with snacks, including a potentially devastating cup of noodles.
Denni Wilson, burn coordinator and trauma nurse at the University of Oklahoma, said: KOCO 5‘At that temperature it takes less than half a second to produce a third-degree burn.’
The boiling point of water is 212 degrees Fahrenheit, but in the microwave that temperature can exceed 300 degrees.
Ms Wilson said: ‘What we see is children using the microwave alone and usually the microwaves are hotter than they normally are in a home.
“And they reach out to get them out, and they’re hotter than they expect them to be.”
Ms. Wilson crunched the numbers over the past few years and found that out of 228 burns, 86 were caused by ramen noodles.
Most of the patients were middle school children or older, but sometimes children as young as 18 months old knock a container off the counter and burn themselves.
The burns you’ve seen at the OU Health Unit look similar to grease burns. In addition to blisters, the burns cause swelling and peeling.
If blisters break or the skin is damaged, there is an increased risk of infection, which manifests as increased redness, swelling and pus.
Since then, she has started an awareness campaign at OU Health called the Ramen Noodle Program and hands out ramen that comes in packets, not cups.
She said, ‘Since 2021 when we launched this, to date, I have given out over 16,500 packs of Ramen noodles, and we have gone from 38 percent of our total burns being Ramen noodles to 11 percent now.’
“You need to seek medical attention if you notice blisters,” Wilson said.
Researchers at the University of Chicago similarly quantified the considerable impact a cup of scalding hot noodles can have on an unsuspecting child.
Researchers at the university’s Burn Center collected data on burn patients between 2010 and 2020.
Of the 790 cases examined by the team, 31 percent were linked In addition, unsupervised children were at greater risk: 40 percent of burns caused by instant noodles occurred when children were alone at the time of the incident.
Dr. Sebastian Vrouwe, senior author of that report and a professor of surgery at UChicago Medicine, said: ‘Anecdotally, it seemed like every other child who came to us for burns had been injured by instant noodles, so we wanted to look at the data to see what the trend really was.
‘The amount of heat contained in these noodles can easily cause second- and third-degree burns on anyone, but young children are particularly vulnerable due to their relatively smaller bodies and thinner skin.’
Burn experts say adults should always remove noodles from the microwave to minimize spills and keep them out of reach until the liquid has cooled to about 120 degrees Fahrenheit.