Despite the failure of previous efforts, Utah ought to mount a new campaign to put back on the books a tough law requiring all motorcyclists to wear helmets.
In fact, that goes for the many other states that, like Utah, enacted strict helmet laws in the 1970s only to repeal or weaken them under pressure from misguided motorcyclists.The need for a fresh drive to enact helmet laws should be clear from a new study in California whose findings were reported the other day in the Western Journal of Medicine.
In essence, the new study shows that those cyclists who wear helmets fare better than those who don't by a wide variety of measures. In brief, the helmet-wearers:
- Have fewer head and facial injuries.
- Sustain less serious injuries than those without a helmet.
- Require fewer days on an artificial respirator.
- Are less likely to be discharged from the hospital with a physical disability or brain damage.
- Suffer few or no serious neck injuries, contrary to cyclists' claims that helmets increase the risk of such injuries.
- Incur medical costs that are dramatically lower. The average hospital charge for the helmeted cyclists was about $16,000, compared with about $30,000 for the unhelmeted riders.
The lesson should be clear: The next time a mandatory helmet law is proposed, the most compelling arguments are to be found not in the halls of the Legislature but in the emergency room of the hospital.