The following appeared in a health newsletter."A ten-year nationwide study of the effectiveness of wearing a helmet while bicycling indicates that ten years ago, approximately 35 percent of all bicyclists reported wearing helmets, whereas today that numbe

The author makes an argument for government to launch an education programme to reduce the number of serious injuries caused by the bicycle accidents by highlighting safety factors other than the helmets, based on the conclusion that helmet wearing has resulted in bicyclists feeling more safer and taking more risks. He supports his argument based on two studies which have been carried out in the ten-year period. However, a number of questions need to be answered before argument is evaluated to be sound.

Firstly, there is question whether the statistics that state that helmet wearing has increased from 35% to 80% is actually accurate. The argument only mentions that the numbers were reported by the users themselves and there is no independent objective evaluation of the data. It may be that the bicyclists were false reporting and infact bicyclists wearing helmets is much less than reported figure and even be zero. This undermines the claim made by the author that accidents occurred despite wearing helmets. Furthermore, there is no data on actual number of bicyclists. We did not even know whether the number increased or decreased.

Secondly, another study comes out with data that the number of accidents have increased by 200 percent. However, it is silent about numbers or resulting change in the vehicular traffic during the intervening years. It may be possible that 10-years ago there was no accidents among 10 bicyclists and presently there are 2 accidents among 1000 bicyclists. This increase may be accounted for by increased vehicular traffic. At the same time it does not give any data on whether people involved in these accidents infact wear helmets. Due to lack of the above evidence there is no reasonable way to conclude that accidents happened despite wearing helmets or that they took more risks or the environment itself became risky because of increased traffic. This makes the conclusion flawed.

Finally, there is the question of whether the 200 percent increase in accidents account for serious injuries or not. If these accidents only result in minor injuries then there is no need for additional government efforts for education programme for reducing the number of serious injuries. May be what is needed is a simple first aid kit or increasing awareness to encourage more people to wear helmets as they may have prevented serious injuries to bicyclists.

In conclusion, there is need for more information to ensure above questions are answered. Failure to answer the questions regarding the actual number of accidents, whether the accidents resulted in serious injuries or whether there was independent objective evaluation of reports by the bicyclists, would render the recommendation suspect and feeble.