I was curious just how many kids were killed by the old style refrigerators. I remember when I was a kid TV shows would have special episodes warning of the danger of being locked inside by accident. Unfortunately the articles cited on that Wikipedia page don't have good numbers. There are a handful of anecdotes at the end of the article, but sadly no statistics.

I have a feeling this is one of those cases where a small handful of cases got a disproportionate amount of media attention. It doesn't hurt to fix the problem, but it ends up being one of thousands of possible problems that people arbitrarily decided to fixate on.