Chris Phillipo wrote:


Why oh why do these sites only take fatalities into account.

There are good reasons. Here are a couple:

First, those who promote MHLs always seem to focus on saving lives.
It's useful to show that idea's false.

Second, there's little doubt when a person is dead. The definition of
"Dead" is pretty water tight. By contrast, the definition of "head
injury" is amazingly vague - in fact there is no official definition.

More detail on that: the Thompson & Rivara study that calculated the
ridiculous "85%" benefit from helmets literally counted scratched chins
and cut ears as "head injuries," as in "injuries above the neck." Of
course, helmet promoters know that most people hear the words "head
injuries" and think of human vegetables. The fuzzy definition works to
the helmet promoters' advantage.

The FACT
is, if an accident is severe enough to kill you then it's going to kill
you with or without a Styrofoam hat on your head. The value of helmets
is injury prevention.

It would be good if you'd repeat that, loudly and often. If legislators
understood how truly limited helmets are, they wouldn't be trying to
pass inane laws.


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Frank Krygowski [To reply, remove rodent and vegetable dot com,
replace with cc.ysu dot edu]