Experts warn of lightning-strike injuries with electronic devices

TRENTON, New Jersey: Listen to an iPod during a storm and you might get more than electrifying tunes.

A Canadian jogger suffered wishbone-shaped burns on his chest and neck, ruptured eardrums and a broken jaw when lightning traveled through his music player's wires.

Last summer, a Colorado teen ended up with similar injuries when lightning struck nearby as he was listening to his iPod while mowing the lawn.

Emergency physicians report treating other patients with burns from freak accidents while using personal electronic devices like beepers, music players and laptop computers outdoors during storms.

Michael Utley, a former stockbroker from West Yarmouth, Massachusetts, who survived being struck by lightning while golfing, has tracked 13 cases since 2004 of people hit while talking on cellphones. They are described on his lightning safety Web site, www.struckbylightning.org.

Contrary to some urban legends and media reports, electronic devices do not attract lightning the way a tall tree or a lightning rod does.

"It's going to hit where it's going to hit, but once it contacts metal, the metal conducts the electricity," said Mary Ann Cooper of the American College of Emergency Physicians and an emergency-room doctor at University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago.

When lightning jumps from a nearby object to a person, it often flashes over the skin. But metal in electronic devices - or metal jewelry or coins in a pocket - can cause contact burns and exacerbate the damage.

A spokeswoman for Apple, the maker of iPods, declined to comment. Packaging for iPods and some other music players do include warnings against using them in the rain.

Lightning strikes can occur even if a storm is many miles away, so lightning safety experts have been pushing the slogan "When thunder roars, go indoors," Cooper said.

Jason Bunch, 18, said it was not even raining last July, but there was a storm in the distance. Lightning struck a nearby tree, shot off and hit him.

Bunch, who was listening to Metallica while mowing the grass at his home in Castle Rock, Colorado, still has mild hearing damage in both ears, despite two reconstructive surgeries to repair ruptured eardrums. He had burns from the earphone wires on the sides of his face, a nasty burn on his hip where the iPod had been in a pocket and "a bad line up the side of my body," even though the iPod cord was outside his shirt.

"It was a real miracle" he survived, said his mother, Kelly Risheill.

The Canadian jogger suffered worse injuries, according to a report in The New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday.

The man, a 39-year-old dentist from the Vancouver area, was listening to an iPod while jogging in a thunderstorm when, according to witnesses, lightning hit a tree and jumped to his body. The strike threw the man about 2.5 meters, or 8 feet, and caused second-degree burns on his chest and left leg.

The electric current left red burn lines running from where the iPod had been strapped to his chest up the sides of his neck. It ruptured both ear drums, dislocated tiny ear bones that transmit sound waves, and broke the man's jaw in four places, said Eric Heffernan, an imaging specialist at Vancouver General Hospital.