‘It’s the Concussion Crisis, Stupid – Fed Probe of Football Helmet Safety Must Not Scratch the Surface’ … today at Beyond Chron

Senator Tom Udall’s proposed bill on football helmet safety, announced last week, is a step on the road to national sports concussion reform. An analogy might be the scandal over the quality of the body armor secured for our troops in Asia. Policy questions are rarely about hardware. They’re about software – the human decisions to put our military in harm’s way abroad, or to expose our youth to unacceptable risks in fun and games at home.

We seem headed for helmet hearings in Congress in some form, on either Udall’s initiative or that of Democrats at the House Commerce Committee. What’s important at this point is to make sure these C-SPAN exercises don’t just scapegoat the manufacturers, which are almost certainly producing progressively improved helmets. Nor is the villain of the piece NOCSAE – the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, an overmatched trade oversight group. The root problem is that there’s no such thing as a concussion-proof football helmet.

Let’s direct the fire where it belongs: at the industry’s upper-echelon custodians in the National Football League. Uncontrolled collisions are what have driven television rights fees and merchandise through the roofs of municipal-financed stadiums, and the league has done as little about the problem as it could get away with. Meanwhile, at great public health cost, concussion syndrome permeated down through amateur sports in frightening dimensions we are just beginning to quantify.

CONTINUED TODAY AT BEYOND CHRON, THE SAN FRANCISCO ONLINE NEWSPAPER:

http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/It_s_the_Concussion_Crisis_Stupid_Fed_Probe_of_Football_Helmet_Safety_Must_Not_Scratch_the_Surface_9009.html