The American Academy of Paediatrics has recommended that hot dogs be redesigned to make them, well, less sausage-shaped. This is because they account for around 17% of the food-related choking deaths of up to 77 children, and the emergency treatment of 15,000, in the United States every year.

"If you were to take the best engineers in the world and try to design the perfect plug for a child's airway, it would be a hot dog," Gary Smith, director of the Centre for Injury Research and Policy at the Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, told USA Today.

The academy also wants food manufacturers to put choking warning labels on their products, in the way that toy manufacturers are required to.

According to Stephen Cadwallader, a food technical consultant, hot dogs could easily be redesigned in any number of ways: square, circular or "pretty much any shape you wanted. It would be a piece of cake, if that's not the wrong choice of words. But then would it be a hot dog as we know and love it, and will people buy it?"

Other high-risk foods highlighted by the academy included grapes, nuts, chunks of vegetables and items such as hard sweets, chewing gum and marshmallows. "It is noteworthy that many foods with high-risk characteristics associated with choking are man-made," wrote the report's authors. "The characteristics of these foods are engineered and, therefore, amenable to change."

But if there is no market for a flat hot dog, what is the answer? "I think the best thing would be to do nothing, and just get people to try their best to use their common sense," says Cadwallader. "We just cut them into bits for our two kids."