Food Poisoning and Allergic Reactions at Daycare: Can You Sue?
Posted on: 7 March 2017
When you leave your child at daycare, you are entrusting the daycare facility with your child's health and well-being. If your child experiences a severe food poisoning or allergic reaction, this is a big potential negligence on their part. Here are some suggestions on evaluating what legal actions to take.
What Are the Potential Health Complications?
Food poisoning is no joke, especially for young children. The bacteria from food poisoning can linger for years and have deleterious effects on health. Young children may need to be hospitalized because they have a smaller reserve of fluids and can get severely dehydrated quickly. Allergic reactions can be even more deadly. Either of these situations presents serious reason to seek out legal counsel against your child care facility.
Can You Trace the Incident to Daycare?
If you are going to claim that the food poisoning was certainly caused by the daycare facility, then you probably need to have some evidence of that. If multiple children got severely ill, that is a good indicator that the damage was related to food that the center served. In that case, you may join forces with multiple families to file a lawsuit.
For allergic reactions that result in anaphylaxis, it's also pretty clear when an allergen was served by the facility since the reaction happened on the spot.
Was Daycare Staff Negligent?
It is also important that you show how the facility was negligent in taking care of your child. That's easy when the facility served up some rotten food. With allergies, be sure to have documentation that shows your facility was specifically warned about the allergy. Since children may not be able to monitor their own allergies, staff have a very important role to play in keeping children safe by keeping them from being exposed to allergens. If a facility staff member mindlessly gave your child something they were allergic to, then that is of grave cause for concern, and you have grounds to sue for negligence.
Should You Speak With a Lawyer?
The best thing to do would be to speak with a personal injury lawyer who can help you evaluate your odds of success if you decide to pursue this lawsuit. Life-threatening illnesses, or ones that have long-term effects, are the best starting points for a successful case. The awarded damages could include ongoing medical treatment costs plus additional penalties for the daycare center's negligence.
Share