“…It may be food (see, e.g., [8,38,49,50]), non-food (see, e.g., [32,51]), or miscellaneous solid or flexible objects including balloons, coins, seeds, nuts, safety pins, pen caps, balls, marbles, toy components or small batteries (see, e.g., [52,53,5,54]). The concern about safety hazards related to choking and suffocation accidents has given rise to a number of safety alarms and epidemiological studies (see, e.g., [1,2,3,55,11,56,20,57,58,59,60,21]). Some of these investigations show clearly that the accidental risks are mostly similar between different countries, and the corresponding comparisons will not be investigated in the present paper, which will be essentially centered on the U.S. situation (see, also, [61,62,63,23,64]).…”