Control Those Impulses
Jim Helmkamp didn't even know what an ATV was until a few years ago. Today, all-terrain vehicles--popular four-wheel motorbikes--are the focus of much of his work as the director of the West Virginia University Injury Control Research Center. They are also, he says, a frightening example of how much more likely men are than women to kill themselves in accidents involving boneheaded stunts, too much drinking--or both. ATV deaths total several hundred each year, and between 1990 and 2003, men accounted for 87 percent of them.
It's not just ATVs, either. Across the country, accidents kill some 70,000 men yearly, making unintentional injuries the third-leading cause of male death. It's No.1 for males between the ages of 1 and 44. At both work and play, men are nearly twice as likely as women are to die accidentally. Men hold 54 percent of all jobs in America, but they account for fully 92 percent of workplace deaths--more than 5,000 a year, involving everything from electrocutions to falls from extreme heights. Men are more than three times as likely as women to drown, often as a result of speed-boating and jet-skiing stunts, and more than twice as many men as women die in car crashes every year.
Rough stuff. "Men are more likely to engage in risk-taking behaviors of all sorts," says Ileana Arias, director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It's a strong drive, and the best ways to thwart it seem to be safety laws and safety gear.
Men behaving badly start very young. When they are just a year old, boys have two to three times the rate of injuries of girls. Boys' tendencies to be more distractible and more impulsive are one reason. Another one is adults' expectations that boys should play rough. "We allow our boys to take risks that we wouldn't allow our girls to take," says Fred Rivara, a pediatrician at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Among teens and young adults, things get more dangerous as bigger boys get bigger toys. Car crashes are the No.1 cause of accidental male death, and many are the result of driving aggressively and driving drunk. "If you look at the safety records, women are just as likely as men to get involved in accidents," says Guohua Li, a professor in the department of emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins University. But women's accidents tend to be "fender benders" so they often to have less serious injuries.
Mandatory protection seems to be a key to keeping men alive. Helmkamp points out that states with some type of safety law for ATVs--helmet requirements or age restrictions, for example--have death rates just half as high as the six states without such laws. Li is now looking into the impacts of compulsory alcohol testing for truck drivers and graduated licensing programs among teen drivers. Both appear promising. Given the male propensity to push the limits, says the CDC's Arias, safety means reining in the risk-takers.
On the Horizon
Better treatments for broken bones and other serious injuries are on the way.
A giant X-ray machine called Statscan images an entire body in seconds, pinpointing injuries. A few hospitals already have one.
Substitute blood, PolyHeme, may work in any patient, avoiding blood-matching problems. It's in clinical trials.
Clotting powders, for severe wounds, can be placed into a bandage. Used by the military, they are now in some civilian ambulances and trauma centers. -Helen Fields
With Helen Fields
This story appears in the September 26, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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