“We hope that what has been achieved synergistically to date, but above all yesterday’s umpteenth tragedy that killed little Alessandro, will commit everyone, starting with the country’s government, to implement the long-awaited and indispensable turning point in order to save at least 20,000 people from potentially “avoidable” death: everyone must be put in a position to save a life!”. Thus Mario Balzanelli, national president of Sis118, comments on what happened yesterday in the Vicenza area, where a 7-year-old boy died suffocated by fragments of a rubber balloon that he had bitten into for fun.
“The event, which was tragically witnessed by the grandmother – he explains – re-proposes, with the utmost urgency, the need to ensure, in an institutional context, that the life-saving maneuvers of First Aid including, the techniques for unblocking the airways from the body stranger, are learned by all citizens, starting from the years of compulsory schooling. To put all citizens of the country in a position to assist, immediately and appropriately, someone who is about to die, whether an infant, a child or an adult, represents an indispensable goal of civilization that we must reach as soon as possible and in relation to which, in the last 8 years, steps of extreme “historical” importance have been taken, which we deem ‘historically necessary’ to recall”.
Balzanelli recalls that since July 2015 “we have brought the teaching of First Aid in Italian schools to the legislative level. We therefore worked, from 2015 to 2017, on the interministerial guidelines, shared between Miur and the Ministry of Health, with which teaching on the subject of First Aid is planned from the years of kindergarten to secondary schools.In 2018, on a mandate from the Miur, we still tested those educational contents in 13 Italian provinces, training and training, free of charge , over 5000 students. The recent law of August 4, 2021, No. 116 on the use of semi-automatic and automatic defibrillators” “has the great merit of bringing back to the center of the strategy for the prevention of sudden death the need to immediately carry out cardiac massage at victims of cardiac arrest”.