Football and Brain Injuries

Posted on October 5, 2007 by Law Office of D. Hardison Wood
As  we know sports injuries are all  too common in  high schools across the nation.  The injuries are not exclusive to the sport, they happen in everything, football, soccer, baseball, basketball, hockey and more.  It is a promising idea to us that there are studies such as the  this one    where there are monitors placed inside the helmets of football players.  These monitors register to a laptop on the sidelines indicating what type of blow to the head the player just received.
The purpose of the high-tech headgear, which uses six strategically placed, spring-loaded accelerometers to wirelessly beam information to a Web-based system on a laptop computer on the sidelines, is to more effectively – and more immediately – detect when blows to players’ heads may result in concussions or more severe brain injuries.


This also opens the opportunity to better pad the helmets by learning where the hits are causing the most damage. 

“We will look at how hard and where they get hit,” he said, adding that one possible outcome of the work may be determining the need to develop a different type of helmet for high school athletes.

“We may find they’re getting hit in different places and need more padding in those areas of the helmet, for example.”

This is so important, as high school students' brains may not be fully developed and furthermore,  the damage that these injuries cause could evolve over years.
Unfortunately, Broglio said, “what other researchers are finding is that people with multiple concussions have incurred Alzheimer’s Disease at a higher rate. Getting their ‘bell rung’ as high school athletes may have permanent repercussions. There seems to be a link.”
It seems this study certainly is a step  in the  right  direction to protecting our children.
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Roof Crush

Posted on August 27, 2007 by Law Office of D. Hardison Wood
A new study relates that strength of a car's roof to its ability to prevent  serious injury  in a rollover crash.
A new report from the University of Alabama has studied Ford's own internal crash test data and concluded that the strength of a vehicle's roof is absolutely critical in preventing death or serious injury in the event of a rollover incident. Read More.

Ford has resisted this common sense conclusion for decades in its defense of hundreds of crashworthiness lawsuits.  In these suits, Ford argues that serious injury and death are not a function of roof strength, but instead these injuries a function of violent rollovers.  Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, championing the position that rollovers are so violent no roof can help, no matter how strong.
I'm hopeful independent analysis such as the above study will continue to resist this overly literal and self-interested interpretation of rollover accidents.  No one disputes that a rollover can generate strong g-forces inside the cabin.  But vans rollover and SUVs rollover... period.  Strong roofs keep heads, necks, and other vital body parts inside and safe from the those deadly gs.  Just ask the many NASCAR drivers who rollover their cars at speeds in excess of 150mph and walk away from these crashes with little more than a scratch.

No reason, other than profit and price, that you can't have the same.

But this brings up another point.  The argument Ford has been using for so long is  flawed on another, more legalistic level.  The inquiry Ford is making preeminent when they argue this way is: could the occupant survive this very deadly crash?

That's a very narrow way of looking of products liability.  Classically, the inquiry is opposed to the above.  That is to say, the focus of the issue is not whether or not there's any way to prevent the damage, but rather whether the risk of the harm justifies the cost of amelioration.

Put another way, in classic legal tort theory we presuppose that you can build a crashworthy vehicle.  And in almost all cases this is true.  Only the most violent, least likely, esoteric collision situations are "un"engineerable.  If that isn't true folks, we are in some trouble cause it means our engineers have hit the wall of innovation.

After we presuppose crashworthiness, we then ask: is the cost of making  the vehicle crashworthy in balance with the potential harm should it remain uncrashworthy.

With around 5,000 SUV deaths alone per year, I would argue we haven't quite hit the cost threshold just yet.  And more importantly, I think most people faced with the question framed in this broad context  would come to the same conclusion.
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