Corinne Peek: Hi. I'm Doctor Corinne Peek, and I'm an epidimiologist and a adjuct professor at UCLA and I'm an author on this study that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. And you have that study, so I'm not going to go through all the points in it, but if you want me to answer questions I will.

Today I'm going to talk a little bit about the history of the helmet law and studies of the helmet law because they have been studied for the last thirty years and these issues have been addressed again and again. And before we actually look at those results I want to talk about why the U. S. Department of Transportation, why the Centers for Disease control, and why we chose to use rates per registration rather than accidents. And to do that we have to think about how do you count motorcycle accidents. What does that mean? Accidents are what's reported to the police. What scenes do the police go to? They are the ones that cause fatality, cause injury and serious damage.

If you picture a motorcyclist riding without a helmet before the law, who was very severely injured, the police are going to go to that scene. If after the law, someone had the helmet on and they weren't seriously injured they rode down, they hit their head on the curb, they can get up and walk away, the police will never respond to that scene. So the number of accidents decreases with any injury prevention measure. So you have a numerator and a denominator that both decrease all of a sudden and you're not going to find as significant effect as with registrations, that's why we choose that figure.

The first helmet law was introduced in 1966, this is data from the U. S. Department of Transportation, and by 1975 when the line peaks at the very bottom, forty-seven states had full mandatory helmet use laws. In 1976 the U. S. Highway Safety Act was amended to exclude incentives for helmet laws and seventeen states repealed their helmet laws. So we can see what happened to the national fatalities for motorcycles immediately after that.

Now I'm going to talk a little bit about some oppositions that we've heard from the helmet law, because they've been examined very thoroughly by the U. S. Department of Transportation and I quote from a report that they issued in 1980, which I don't have copies of but I'm happy to pass around. This is not my own words I'm quoting. "No existing research over the last thirty years supports the claim that helmets increase fatal neck injuries. The neck injury issue has been used by those individuals and organizations which oppose helmet laws in an attempt to exploit a peripheral issue in which there is not a great deal of valid data. Consequently the problem has been magnified far out of proportion."

I want to talk also a minute about why people in our studies say we found an increase in spinal injuries. We didn't. If you look at injuries, there was a decrease in non-fatal spinal injuries. If you think about a whole pie, a whole pie of fatalities, and every injury gets their percent, if you remove a proportion, the head injuries, if you remove that as a proportion, every other proportion is going to increase because you still have all the fatalities as a proportion. So we tested to see did spinal injuries increase more than we expected proportionately, and the answer is no, and you can find that in the study that we sent to you.

I quote again from the U. S. Department of Transportation: "Documentation of whether helmets cause accidents by impairing vision was studied and found not to support the claim that helmets harm vision. With regard to hearing, helmets do reduce a person's ability to hear, but in actual practice, the reduction in auditory capacity for the motorcyclist is inconsequential."

The thing we think is most important is head injuries because helmets do nothing other than prevent head injuries. This is data from the Centers for Disease Control, Head Injury Death Rates From 1979 to 1986: "We show clearly that from 1979 to 1986 full helmet use laws always had lower head injury fatality rates than those partial laws or non-helmet laws."

So in my mind the choice you're making today is whether or not you want California to remain with the red line, which is low head injury fatalities, or whether you're willing to move that up to look like the blue line. Thank you.

Senator Kelley: Thank you, next witness please.

Next Speaker | Back to Speaker's List