Motorcycle protective clothing : protection from injury or just the weather?

Background Apart from helmets, little is known about the effectiveness of motorcycle protective clothing in reducing injuries in crashes. The study aimed to quantify the association between usage of motorcycle clothing and injury in crashes. Methods and findings Cross-sectional analytic study. Crashed motorcyclists (n = 212, 71% of identified eligible cases) were recruited through hospitals and motorcycle repair services. Data was obtained through structured face-to-face interviews. The main outcome was hospitalization and motorcycle crash-related injury. Poisson regression was used to estimate relative risk (RR) and 95% confidence intervals for injury adjusting for potential confounders. Results Motorcyclists were significantly less likely to be admitted to hospital if they crashed wearing motorcycle jackets (RR = 0.79, 95% CI: 0.69–0.91), pants (RR = 0.49, 95% CI: 0.25–0.94), or gloves (RR = 0.41, 95% CI: 0.26–0.66). When garments included fitted body armour there was a significantly reduced risk of injury to the upper body (RR = 0.77, 95% CI: 0.66–0.89), hands and wrists (RR = 0.55, 95% CI: 0.38–0.81), legs (RR = 0.60, 95% CI: 0.40–0.90), feet and ankles (RR = 0.54, 95% CI: 0.35–0.83). Non-motorcycle boots were also associated with a reduced risk of injury compared to shoes or joggers (RR = 0.46, 95% CI: 0.28–0.75). No association between use of body armour and risk of fracture injuries was detected. A substantial proportion of motorcycle designed gloves (25.7%), jackets (29.7%) and pants (28.1%) were assessed to have failed due to material damage in the crash. Conclusions Motorcycle protective clothing is associated with reduced risk and severity of crash related injury and hospitalization, particularly when fitted with body armour. The proportion of clothing items that failed under crash conditions indicates a need for improved quality control. While mandating usage of protective clothing is not recommended, consideration could be given to providing incentives for usage of protective clothing, such as tax exemptions for safety gear, health insurance premium reductions and rebates.

The rules of autogeddon : sex death and law in J G Ballard’s Crash

It was reported that the manuscript of Crash was returned to the publisher with a note reading ‘The author is beyond psychiatric help’. Ballard took the lay diagnosis as proof of complete artistic success. Crash conflates the Freudian tropes of libido and thanatos, overlaying these onto the twentieth century erotic icon, the car. Beyond mere incompetent adolescent copulatory fumblings in the back seat of the parental sedan or the clichéd phallic locomotor of the mid-life Ferrari, Ballard engages the full potentialities of the automobile as the locus and sine qua non of a perverse, though functional erotic. ‘Autoeroticism’ is transformed into automotive, traumatic or surgical paraphilia, driving Helmut Newton’s insipid photo-essays of BDSM and orthopædics into an entirely new dimension, dancing precisely where (but more crucially, because) the ‘body is bruised to pleasure soul’. The serendipity of quotidian accidental collisions is supplanted, in pursuit of the fetishised object, by contrived (though not simulated) recreations of iconographic celebrity deaths. Penetration remains as a guiding trope of sexuality, but it is confounded by a perversity of focus. Such an obsessive pursuit of this autoerotic-as-reality necessitates the rejection of the law of human sexual regulation, requiring the re-interpretation of what constitutes sex itself by looking beyond or through conventional sexuality into Ballard’s paraphiliac and nightmarish consensual Other. This Other allows for (if not demands) the tangled wreckage of a sportscar to function as a transformative sexual agent, creating, of woman, a being of ‘free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its dying chromium and leaking engine-parts, all the deviant possibilities of her sex’.

Preventing injuries on a state-wide basis : researchers and parliamentary committees are partners in turning injury prevention and safety research into practice and policy

Context: Parliamentary committees established in Westminster parliaments, such as Queensland, provide a cross-party structure that enables them to recommend policy and legislative changes that may otherwise be difficult for one party to recommend. The overall parliamentary committee process tends to be more cooperative and less adversarial than the main chamber of parliament and, as a result, this process permits parliamentary committees to make recommendations more on the available research evidence and less on political or party considerations. Objectives: This paper considers the contributions that parliamentary committees in Queensland have made in the past in the areas of road safety, drug use as well as organ and tissue donation. The paper also discusses the importance of researchers actively engaging with parliamentary committees to ensure the best evidence based policy outcomes. Key messages: In the past, parliamentary committees have successfully facilitated important safety changes with many committee recommendations based on research results. In order to maximise the benefits of the parliamentary committee process it is essential that researchers inform committees about their work and become key stakeholders in the inquiry process. Researchers can keep committees informed by making submissions to their inquiries, responding to requests for information and appearing as witnesses at public hearings. Researchers should emphasise the key findings and implications of their research as well as considering the jurisdictional implications and political consequences. It is important that researchers understand the differences between lobbying and providing informed recommendations when interacting with committees. Discussion and conclusions: Parliamentary committees in Queensland have successfully assisted in the introduction of evidence based policy and legislation. In order to present best practice recommendations, committees rely on the evidence presented to them including the results of researchers. Actively engaging with parliamentary committees will help researchers to turn their results into practice with a corresponding decrease in injuries and fatalities. Developing an understanding of parliamentary committees, and the typical inquiry process used by these committees, will help researchers to present their research results in a manner that will encourage the adoption of their ideas by parliamentary committees, the presentation of these results as recommendations within the report and the subsequent enactment of the committee’s recommendations by the government.

Hamstring strain injuries : factors that lead to injury and re-injury

Hamstring strain injuries (HSIs) are common in a number of sports and incidence rates have not declined in recent times. Additionally, the high rate of recurrent injuries suggests that our current understanding of HSI and re-injury risk is incomplete. Whilst the multifactoral nature of HSIs is agreed upon by many, often individual risk factors and/or causes of injury are examined in isolation. This review aims to bring together the causes, risk factors and interventions associated with HSIs to better understand why HSIs are so prevalent. Running is often identified as the primary activity type for HSIs and given the high eccentric forces and moderate muscle strain placed on the hamstrings during running these factors are considered to be part of the aetiology of HSIs. However, the exact causes of HSIs remain unknown and whilst eccentric contraction and muscle strain purportedly play a role, accumulated muscle damage and/or a single injurious event may also contribute. Potentially, all of these factors interact to varying degrees depending on the injurious activity type (i.e. running, kicking). Furthermore, anatomical factors, such as the biarticular organization, the dual innervations of biceps femoris (BF), fibre type distribution, muscle architecture and the degree of anterior pelvic tilt, have all been implicated. Each of these variables impact upon HSI risk via a number of different mechanisms that include increasing hamstring muscle strain and altering the susceptibility of the hamstrings to muscle damage. Reported risk factors for HSIs include age, previous injury, ethnicity, strength imbalances, flexibility and fatigue. Of these, little is known, definitively, about why previous injury increases the risk of future HSIs. Nevertheless, interventions put in place to reduce the incidence of HSIs by addressing modifiable risk factors have focused primarily on increasing eccentric strength, correcting strength imbalances and improving flexibility. The response to these intervention programmes has been mixed with varied levels of success reported. A conceptual framework is presented suggesting that neuromuscular inhibition following HSIs may impede the rehabilitation process and subsequently lead to maladaptation of hamstring muscle structure and function, including preferentially eccentric weakness, atrophy of the previously injured muscles and alterations in the angle of peak knee flexor torque. This remains an area for future research and practitioners need to remain aware of the multifactoral nature of HSIs if injury rates are to decline.

Identifying differences in safe roads and crash prone roads using clustering data mining

Road asset managers are overwhelmed with a high volume of raw data which they need to process and utilise in supporting their decision making. This paper presents a method that processes road-crash data of a whole road network and exposes hidden value inherent in the data by deploying the clustering data mining method. The goal of the method is to partition the road network into a set of groups (classes) based on common data and characterise the class crash types to produce a crash profiles for each cluster. By comparing similar road classes with differing crash types and rates, insight can be gained into these differences that are caused by the particular characteristics of their roads. These differences can be used as evidence in knowledge development and decision support.

Safeguarding rural Australia: addressing masculinity and violence in rural settings : unintentional violent harm including injuries in an Australian rural context : analysis of secondary data analysis

This report is an update of an earlier one produced in January 2010 (see Carrington et al. 2010) which remains as an ePrint through the project’s home page. This report focuses on our examination of extant data which have been sourced with respect to unintentional serious and violent harm, including injuries, to males living in regional and remote Australia . and which were available in public data bases at production. Such harm typically might be caused by, for example, transport accidents, occupational exposures and hazards, burns and so on. Thus unintentional violent harm can cause physical trauma the consequences of which can lead to chronic conditions including psychological harm or substance abuse.

Personal Injuries Proceedings Act 2002, s 32 - Duty to Disclose - consequences of non-disclosure - discretion to excuse non-compliance

In Newson v Aust Scan Pty Ltd t/a Ikea Springwood [2010] QSC 223 the Supreme Court examined the discretion under s 32(2) of the Personal Injuries Proceedings Act 2002 (Qld), to permit a document which has not been disclosed as required by the pre-court procedures under the PIPA to be used in a subsequent court proceeding. This appears to be the first time that the nature and parameters of the discretion have been judicially considered.

The crash and offence involvement of speeding offenders

Overview: The role of speeding in crashes and contributing factors to the behaviour The need to better understand speeding offenders Characteristics of low-range, mid-range and high-range offenders Links to other offending behaviour Implications for speed management policies and practices

An estimation of crash risks using a log-linear model and the induced exposure technique

Prevention and safety promotion programmes. Traditionally, in-depth investigations of crash risks are conducted using exposure controlled study or case-control methodology. However, these studies need either observational data for control cases or exogenous exposure data like vehicle-kilometres travel, entry flow or product of conflicting flow for a particular traffic location, or a traffic site. These data are not readily available and often require extensive data collection effort on a system-wide basis. Aim: The objective of this research is to propose an alternative methodology to investigate crash risks of a road user group in different circumstances using readily available traffic police crash data. Methods: This study employs a combination of a log-linear model and the quasi-induced exposure technique to estimate crash risks of a road user group. While the log-linear model reveals the significant interactions and thus the prevalence of crashes of a road user group under various sets of traffic, environmental and roadway factors, the quasi-induced exposure technique estimates relative exposure of that road user in the same set of explanatory variables. Therefore, the combination of these two techniques provides relative measures of crash risks under various influences of roadway, environmental and traffic conditions. The proposed methodology has been illustrated using Brisbane motorcycle crash data of five years. Results: Interpretations of results on different combination of interactive factors show that the poor conspicuity of motorcycles is a predominant cause of motorcycle crashes. Inability of other drivers to correctly judge the speed and distance of an oncoming motorcyclist is also evident in right-of-way violation motorcycle crashes at intersections. Discussion and Conclusions: The combination of a log-linear model and the induced exposure technique is a promising methodology and can be applied to better estimate crash risks of other road users. This study also highlights the importance of considering interaction effects to better understand hazardous situations. A further study on the comparison between the proposed methodology and case-control method would be useful.

On the significance of omitted variables in intersection crash modeling

Advances in safety research—trying to improve the collective understanding of motor vehicle crash causes and contributing factors—rest upon the pursuit of numerous lines of research inquiry. The research community has focused considerable attention on analytical methods development (negative binomial models, simultaneous equations, etc.), on better experimental designs (before-after studies, comparison sites, etc.), on improving exposure measures, and on model specification improvements (additive terms, non-linear relations, etc.). One might logically seek to know which lines of inquiry might provide the most significant improvements in understanding crash causation and/or prediction. It is the contention of this paper that the exclusion of important variables (causal or surrogate measures of causal variables) cause omitted variable bias in model estimation and is an important and neglected line of inquiry in safety research. In particular, spatially related variables are often difficult to collect and omitted from crash models—but offer significant opportunities to better understand contributing factors and/or causes of crashes. This study examines the role of important variables (other than Average Annual Daily Traffic (AADT)) that are generally omitted from intersection crash prediction models. In addition to the geometric and traffic regulatory information of intersection, the proposed model includes many spatial factors such as local influences of weather, sun glare, proximity to drinking establishments, and proximity to schools—representing a mix of potential environmental and human factors that are theoretically important, but rarely used. Results suggest that these variables in addition to AADT have significant explanatory power, and their exclusion leads to omitted variable bias. Provided is evidence that variable exclusion overstates the effect of minor road AADT by as much as 40% and major road AADT by 14%.

Empirical analysis on relationship between traffic conditions and crash occurrences

This paper investigates relationship between traffic conditions and the crash occurrence likelihood (COL) using the I-880 data. To remedy the data limitations and the methodological shortcomings suffered by previous studies, a multiresolution data processing method is proposed and implemented, upon which binary logistic models were developed. The major findings of this paper are: 1) traffic conditions have significant impacts on COL at the study site; Specifically, COL in a congested (transitioning) traffic flow is about 6 (1.6) times of that in a free flow condition; 2)Speed variance alone is not sufficient to capture traffic dynamics’ impact on COL; a traffic chaos indicator that integrates speed, speed variance, and flow is proposed and shows a promising performance; 3) Models based on aggregated data shall be interpreted with caution. Generally, conclusions obtained from such models shall not be generalized to individual vehicles (drivers) without further evidences using high-resolution data and it is dubious to either claim or disclaim speed kills based on aggregated data.

The prevalence and crash involvement of unlicensed drivers in Queensland

- Road safety implications of unlicensed driving - Present results from two studies conducted in Queensland examining: - the crash involvement of unlicensed drivers and the risks associated with the behaviour - the prevalence of unlicensed driving using a roadside survey method - Countermeasure options