Dr. Kendall Crowns

They are also hard to remove from the airway due to their smooth, slippery texture, which thwarts typical rescue methods.

Foods and objects can easily block a child's airway because their airway is significantly smaller, shorter, and more pliable than an adult.

A child's airway measures between 6-8 mm depending on the age, whereas an adult airway is 20-26 mm in males and 15-22 mm in females.

Other factors include the child's airway is funnel-shaped, the tongue is proportionally bigger, and the epiglottis is floppy.

One example I have of a child choking on food is a five-month-old male.

On the day he died, he had been crawling and scooting around on the floor like he usually did.

He had older siblings, and one of them earlier in the day had knocked over a number of items in the kitchen.

The mother and the child had diligently cleaned it all up and thought they had gotten everything off the floor, but they hadn't.

Something had rolled under the stove, and the five-month-old found it.

When he was found by the mother, he was unresponsive on the floor in the kitchen in the mid-afternoon.

She started CPR.

The other child called 911, but the time emergency medical services arrived, it was too late.

The child had passed away and was pronounced dead at the scene.

He was brought to the medical examiner's office for an autopsy.

And at his autopsy, he was a normal five-month-old male, no evidence of injury, no congenital abnormalities or birth defects.

Internally, it was the same, no injuries, no congenital abnormalities.

But when I took out his throat structures, he had a maraschino cherry blocking his airway.

He had no teeth, so he had swallowed this cherry whole, and it had gotten stuck in the back of his throat because his airway was so small, and the cherry completely blocked it.

and he was unable to breathe and probably died within a few minutes.

His cause of death, choking, manner of death, accident.