Tomorrow, Friday 29 May, is Fatality Free Friday down under. As noted on the website, Road safety is a complex issue but we believe that if drivers consciously think about road safety and safe driving for just one Friday in the year, that day’s toll – statistically about 5.3 deaths – could be reduced to […]
Category: News & Notes
Injury prevention and Indigenous Australians
Yesterday I came across a report which estimated the fatal burden of disease and injury for Indigenous Australians. Included were estimates of the magnitude of the fatal burden ‘gap’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The Burden of Disease Study: Fatal burden of disease in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people 2010 report includes fatal burden calculations in […]
Controversial ad during US Super Bowl broadcast
American football’s championship game, the Super Bowl, was played last Sunday (those of us based in Seattle would rather not dwell on the result). The game was the most watched telecast in U.S. history, with an estimated 114.4 million viewers. Not surprisingly, this huge audience is an advertising jackpot – the revenue from this year’s game exceeded 330 million U.S. dollars. An […]
Workshop blog correction
My apologies, it seems I need tuition in proof-reading! I mistakenly omitted Dr Ted Miller, Injury Prevention, as one of the Editors who will be leading the discussion at this great workshop. […]
SAVIR 2015 Workshop
The very interesting workshop, Nurturing a Successful Academic/Early Professional Publishing Career, will be held at the SAVIR 2015 conference in New Orleans next month. The workshop will be held from 4.45pm to 6.00pm in the Oak Alley room, Sheraton Hotel. Why are we holding this workshop? Because academic environments expect early career professionals to publish […]
Sharing Data Collection Instruments
In the April 2014 issue, I highlighted a new service from SAVIR and SafetyLit – a searchable repository of injury-related data collection instruments. In follow-up correspondence, Kavi Bhalla points out that the injuries group in the global burden of disease study had also compiled a collection of instruments with questions related to measuring injury incidence. Interested? You […]
Public and political perception of risk: Injury prevention implications
Unfortunately in Australia in the last week, two men have died as a result of shark bites. The media response, which by no means is unique in these cases, has been overwhelming, with responses ranging from the call to kill the offending sharks (despite protestations of the family, for example see http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-01/search-for-shark-that-killed-bodyboarder-zac-young/5127228), and increasing the range of shark netting […]
Open access: I told you so
I have often inveighed against open access journals, or at least urged readers of this blog to be alert to predatory journals. Recently Retraction Watch posted an item from Science that greatly strengthens my concerns. The posting describes a paper sent to over 300 OA journals that was accepted by over one half. The only […]
Anti helmet legislation revisited… and why replication is important
Another anti helmet legislation argument bites the dust When Ian Walker’s paper appeared in Accid Anal Prev in 2007 purporting to show that cars drove closer to helmeted than unhelmeted cyclists, it was quickly used as another argument against helmet legislation. But for me as a long time cyclist, something did not ring true. Jake […]
Wellington’s recent earthquakes
Hearing that Wellington (on the north island on New Zealand) had been struck by an earthquake of 6.8 magnitude, just weeks after being shaken by a 6.5 magnitude earthquake, has me thinking that ‘injury prevention’ is so much more broad in scope than perhaps I had previously realised. Having visited Wellington in October 2012, I am familiar […]