Heatstroke

While recognizing that driving a car is very serious business, officials hope that these signs will be more than one-time reminders to drivers. In addition to making people laugh, they hope these attention-grabbing signs will be family conversation starters, and help create more long-term safe driving habits.

Heatstroke is a condition that occurs when the body isn’t able to cool itself quickly enough and the body temperature rises to dangerous levels. Children are at great risk for heatstroke because a child’s body heats up three to five times faster than an adult’s. When the internal body temperature reaches 104 degrees, children’s organs start to shut down. And when it reaches 107 degrees, the child can die.

From his pictures, Dustin Gessert looks like he and actor Bradley Cooper were separated at birth. But Gessert, an officer with the Wisconsin Rapids Police Department, made his own headlines recently as the leading man in a rescue story.

On an 85-degree day at the end of May, Officer Gessert was responding to an unrelated child welfare 911 call when he came across what could have been a tragic situation. He had to look twice before he saw the small boy, left alone in a car.

Every 10 days, across the United States, a child dies while unattended in a hot car. It only takes a few minutes for a car to heat up and become deadly to a child inside. As summer temperatures rise, more kids are at risk – the death toll this summer has already exceeded 20.