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When someone is burned

For people in the United States when someone has been burned or scalded: a hand on the stove, a spilled cup of coffee, a child in a hot bath, oil from a pan, a cleaner on the skin, a shock from a cord, clothes that caught fire, a day too long in the sun. For the person it happened to, and for whoever is beside them. Is this a 911 burn? Cool it, cover it. What not to put on it. Clothes or a room on fire. Chemical burns. Electricity and lightning. Smoke, and a burned airway. Sunburn. Children and scalds. The days after. Before the next one. And the words to say when you call. No quiz and no score. One thing at a time.

This page and its wording were written with AI (Claude) for Scarlet Beast (our AI policy). Changed on October 9, 2026: until today this page carried many first aid steps that we had taken from four MedlinePlus medical encyclopedia pages, reworded and marked “Ours”. Their publisher does not allow that text to be reused, and the steps were not ours. Each one is now replaced with what a source named below says, or taken out, and the page no longer links those four pages. For electric shock and power lines it now passes on a page from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, What to Do to Protect Yourself From Electrical Hazards, read on October 9, 2026. The page says less than it did about shock, burned airways, chemicals that are powders, and tetanus shots. Changed on October 14, 2026: the page used to pass on many lines from three pages of the American Academy of Pediatrics, on HealthyChildren.org. Its terms do not allow its content to be used with AI tools, so those lines are out, and the three pages are linked without a summary. What replaced them comes from pages read on October 14, 2026: the American Burn Association (Scald Burns, re-read), the U.S. Fire Administration (Fire Safety for Children), the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (Avoiding Tap Water Scalds, a PDF), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (Should You Put Sunscreen on Infants? Not Usually), the CDC (Sun Safety Facts, re-read) and Poison Control (First aid guidelines, re-read). Gone, because no other page we read says them: an oozing burn, rubbing a burn, a year out of the sun for a healed burn, carrying a baby and a hot drink, the microwave, fireplaces with glass doors, hot playground slides, when to call about an older child’s sunburn, and calling if redness and pain last more than a few hours. The other facts come from pages read on October 2, 2026: MedlinePlus, from the U.S. National Library of Medicine (its health topics Burns, Electrical Injuries and Inhalation Injuries); the American Burn Association (Burn First Aid; Scald Burns; Chemical Burns; and the opening of its burn center directory); the American Academy of Dermatology (How to treat a first-degree, minor burn; and How to treat sunburn); Ready.gov (Home Fires); the U.S. Fire Administration (Cooking Fire Safety; Smoke Alarms; and Home Fire Escape Plans); the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (Fireworks); the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Sun Safety Facts); the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (Sunscreen: How to Help Protect Your Skin from the Sun); the National Weather Service (Five Ways Lightning Strikes People); Poison Control, from the National Capital Poison Center (First aid guidelines, read earlier the same day for our poisoning page); the front page of the Phoenix Society for Burn Survivors and its Phoenix SOAR page; and the front page of the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline. The descriptions of the 988 Lifeline and Crisis Text Line are from their own front pages, read the same day. The American Burn Association, the American Academy of Dermatology, the National Capital Poison Center, the Phoenix Society, Childhelp and Crisis Text Line are private organisations describing themselves; we have no connection with any of them. We did not call or text any line. Four pages we asked for returned “page not found” (among them the U.S. Fire Administration’s page on scalds and a Consumer Product Safety Commission web page on tap water scalds), so they are not used; the Commission’s PDF on tap water scalds, found on October 14, is. We did not read any first aid manual or CPR course, any clinical guideline or burn referral criteria, any workplace rule, or the research behind any statement; where the page touches one of these, it says so. Where sources say different things, the page reports each: how many minutes to cool a burn, whether to put a cream or ointment on a small burn, how long to rinse off a chemical, petroleum jelly on sunburn, and the sunscreen number. The page has no questionnaire and gives no score, on purpose: a list is not an assessment. It names no pain medicine or numbing ingredient and gives no dose. It quotes no named person and gives no figures for how many people are burned or die in fires; the sources have them, with their context. The times, sizes and temperatures on the page (minutes of cooling and rinsing, larger than a hand, 120 degrees Fahrenheit) are the sources’ own. Lines marked “Ours” are our own suggestions. This page saves nothing: no account, no cookies, nothing you tick is stored or sent, and no analytics (privacy). Scarlet Beast is not a clinic, a burn center, a fire department or a government agency, and takes no money from anyone named here. Found a mistake? Email [email protected].