Brian Johnston noticed this item in a website describing a decision by county councilors in Kerry, Ireland to allow residents of their area to drive after ‘two or three’ drinks. The motion calls on the Minister for Justice to enable police “to issue permits to people in the most isolated parts of the country to […]
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Call for abstracts: Canadian Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion Conference
The next Canadian Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion Conference will be held November 5-7, 2013 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. I had the pleasure of attending last year, in Vancouver, and found the meeting to be scientifically interesting with a strong practical grounding. On a per capita basis, there seems to be a disproportionate number of Canadians doing internationally recognized work in our field. […]
Graphic safety message at car show
Rene Bruemmer contributed a powerful article to todays local paper, the Montreal Gazette, describing an exhibit at the International Auto Show. It is “the crumpled hulk of a 1982 Camaro in which two men died four months ago.” Apparently they “ran off a country road … driving fast on booze and worn out […]
Why “Dreamliners” may be having nightmares
Recently one or two Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner aircrafts have had serious safety problems from batteries catching fire. An article in the Washington Post by Craig Timberg indicates that airplane model builders are entirely familiar with issues associated with the use of the lithium ion batteries that feature in this airplane. In the view of the […]
What a Quebec cartoonist sees when he looks over the border
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Gun control lessons from Australia
Editors note: On Jan 16 the following appeared on The New York Times Opinion Page. In my view it is a critically important contribution to the gun control debate. John Howard was a brave politician who defied the odds after the rampage in Tasmania when a deranged person using an assault rifle killed 35 people. […]
Injury Research in LMICs Requires a Fundamental Directional Change
I want to make the point that an essential shift in injury research from burden assessment to hypothesis testing is still lagging in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) Every month hundreds of injury research publications originating from Low- and Middle-Income Countries find a place in scientific journals. Recent bibliographic analysis has revealed that the numbers […]
Recent French Intervention to Increase Drunk Drivers’ Self-Accountability
France has achieved remarkable road safety results in the last decade. It almost halved its road fatalities from 2002 to 2005, and the decreasing trend has continued. Most of these reductions are attributed to rigorous speed control, particularly by automated cameras and the issuance of speed tickets. Drunk driving, however, remains a major problem as […]
When religion and safety clash, who wins?
Rafael Consunji sent me this interesting and somewhat troubling report about a recent law in Aceh, Indonesia that would prohibit women from ‘straddling’ motorcycles or bicycles. He said “this is causing an uproar in Indonesia. The driving force behind the law is not safety but concern about breaking Shari’a law when straddling. The Jakarta Globe […]
What questions about gun violence should new research address?
One of the executive actions taken today by President Obama in response to recent mass shootings was to “direct the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.” This is a major shift away from federal policy of the last 15+ years which has effectively suppressed funding of public health research into firearm injury and […]