Originally Posted by
JonathanGennick
Ok. Here's a question: If one were a public health official and wanting to reduce the quantity of head injuries, would it be sensible to choose the segment from this report having the largest quantity and to attack that segment first? Would it make sense to look at household injuries from flooring and furniture and so forth, and how to prevent those?
Not from this report alone. It's not just the lack of rate information, it's that we don't have any data telling us the likelihood of reduction of injury from effective products redesign. I'll leave flooring and furniture out of this because those are entirely too large categories to make any sort of meaningful generalizations (already making the problem with using these data self-evident), but even when it's as narrow as "car seats", the text states that one of the major categories of car seat injuries is when the parent places the baby in the car seat on a high shelf or the like, and then the baby falls off of that high shelf. We can't tell from the data whether there is any car seat engineering fix that would make it less likely for the seat to fall or to protect the baby better from the fall that didn't sacrifice effectiveness of the car seat in its primary function of protecting the child from the effects of auto accidents.
I think it's increasingly obvious, btw, that the only truly effective way to prevent brain injuries from football is not to play football. The basic risk of having people beat each other up for an hour is probably irreducible beyond a certain point that we've probably neared already.
As far as bicycles, I suspect we've gone about as far with helmets as we can, and that any improvements are likely to be incremental. Is there any possibility of a basic bicycle redesign that would make it less likely that a kid hits his/her head? I doubt it. I'd also like to know how many of these bicycle accidents are actually motor vehicle accidents--i.e., kid was riding a bike when struck by a car.