injury prevention

He was in his truck, he was out of his truck.  He was in his truck, he was out of his truck. On a recent walk in the neighborhood, I couldn’t help but notice my mailman’s pattern of work. He was in-and-out of his truck many times to bring packages up to my neighbors’ front doors. “Lot of packages, eh?” I asked walking passed him. “More and more,” he said, starting up the mail truck again and driving off. A few houses up the street, he was out of his truck again as I again walked passed. “It’s going to be a long day, eh?” I commented. “Tis the season,” he said. “It will be like this till the…
Anyone who’s lived in a big, dense city is familiar with the sight of bicycle messengers weaving their way in between metro buses and taxi cabs, down side streets and around packed crosswalks, pedaling at impressive speeds and often with remarkable agility. Surprisingly, however, there’s little data on these workers, even though it seems they’d be particularly susceptible to injuries on the job. To fill in that knowledge gap, a group of researchers from New York University School of Medicine and Bellevue Hospital Center decided to take a deeper look. Hypothesizing that those commercial…
It puts a smile on my face when I come across a worker who uses ingenuity to address a safety hazard. I had a big grin yesterday as I was leaving a restaurant in Austin, TX. I was walking around the outside of the building toward the area where I’d parked my car. I saw one of the restaurant’s employees dragging a garbage can toward a dumpster. I looked away for just a minute and in that brief moment, he'd propped open the dumpster lid, like so: Restaurant worker with gadget to keep dumpster lid open, Austin, TX (September 17, 2015)   It’s been quite a few years since I worked in a…
Building safe ways for children to bike and walk to school is more than just a way of encouraging kids to go outside and get active. According to a new study, it’s also an investment that reaps millions of dollars in societal gains. In other words, smart walking and biking infrastructures for kids make good economic sense. Published in the July issue of the American Journal of Public Health, the study examined the cost-effectiveness of Safe Routes to School (SRTS) infrastructure in just one city — New York City. SRTS was initially enacted in 2005 as part of a massive federal transportation…