There is increasing concern about the risk associated with distracted driving and more specifically with the manipulation of cell/smartphones while driving. Adolescents are a population at high risk given that approximately 50% of youth age 16 and older (U.S. data) admits texting/e-mailing while driving in the past-month. A recent study by Klauer et al., Distracted […]
Latest articles
A Gap in Gun Violence Injury Prevention Data in the United States
Do guns make people safer? Do comprehensive back ground checks limit gun violence in the United States? Which gun violence or firearm safety interventions work in our states? What effect do right-to-carry laws have on our communities? Nine years ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was on the forefront of trying to […]
BokSmart: 5 questions with Dr James Brown
A study in the June 2015, Volume 21, Issue 3 of Injury Prevention, The BokSmart intervention programme is associated with improvements in injury prevention behaviours of rugby union players: an ecological cross-sectional study comes to us from researchers based in South Africa. This research assessed whether player behaviour improved since the launch of the BokSmart […]
Athletic Injury Rates during Ramadan
Ramadan began on June 18th and will likely end on July 19 this year. For those who don’t know, Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar. Muslims believe this month to be when the first verse of the Quran was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. As an act of devotion and self-control, […]
Data viz: adolescent injury and mental health
I’m addicted to interactive visualisations of data, when they are well-made, informative and easy to use. One that I’ve returned to repeatedly is the “GBD 2010 Heat Map“, which ranks causes of deaths and DALY’s globally. The graph is based on the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries and Risk factors Study, an impressive project that […]
Firearms in the house and risk of suicide
Suicide is an important form of external-cause mortality. The World Health Organization estimates that every 40 seconds a person commits suicide in the world. Given that a high proportion of suicides happen impulsively it makes sense that limiting the easy access to lethal means of suicide, such as firearms, during the suicidal crisis, could help […]
Use area-wide traffic calming to reduce road carnage
Yesterday the Uganda was hit by news of a road traffic crash in which 13 high school students were seriously injured. This is the fourth crash to be registered on the newly-constructed Masaka highway (linking the capital city of Uganda-Kampala to Kigali, Rwanda) in a space of ten days. Just days earlier, three people including […]
Management of sports-related concussion: is research making a difference yet?
Sports-related concussion is currently, arguably, the most heated topic in sports injury prevention. Sensationalist media headlines and stories about the toll of concussive hits, particularly in contact sports, are all-too-common. Recently, during the FIFA Women’s World Cup, we saw this head-knock between Alexandra Popp and Morgan Brian, which once again called into question protocols around the […]
Media and injury prevention
As an injury prevention researcher, I am often dismayed at the way in which injuries, risk, and injury prevention efforts are portrayed in the media. I clearly recall being disgusted as an idealistic teenager, having read a newspaper article regarding the untimely death of a peer who had been killed during a police chase. The […]
Minimising dance injury through changing dance floors
As someone who has appreciated many dance performances (primarily as I have absolutely NO dancing ability or talent in any single speck of my body!), and as an injury prevention researcher and advocate, my interest was piqued by an article authored by Hopper, Alderson, Elliott, & Ackland recently published in the Journal of Science and […]