BDA re helmets

A letter to the British dental Association re their stance on helmets.

Anthony Kravitz OBE British Dental Association 64 Wimpole Street London W1G 8YS

Dear Sir,

In a recent debate in Parliament, it was stated that the British Dental Asosciation supported a bill to compel children to wear cycle helmets. Not all the facts and figures presented in the debate bear close scrutiny, and I am conscious that this might well be one of them, so I write in the hope of clarification.

Would you please confirm whether this is the official position of the BDA, adopted through due constitutional process? Or is it that a message generally supportive of cycle helmet use has perhaps been misconstrued?

I am certainly unable to find any reference to this on your website, and am at something of a loss to understand why you would have such a policy given that cycle helmets have no effect on injuries to the lower face. Indeed, given the evidence that helmeted riders are more likely to crash, I would have thought that you might be against such a measure.

You will no doubt be aware that helmet compulsion has been tried in a number of jurisdictions, and has failed in each case to reduce injury rates; the Government says that it knows of no case where cyclist safety has improved with increasing helmet use. Compulsion has, however, substantially reduced levels of cycling, which is why the British Medical Association and Royal College of General Practitioners, notwithstanding their support for the wearing of helmets through choice, are opposed to compulsion.

This more cautious position is held by a number of public health bodies, and seems prudent given the inconclusive nature of the research, with small-scale studies proposing benefit being strongly contradicted by robust population-level figures showing no benefit. The reasons for this are not fully understood, and it seems to me to be rash to support a policy which is known never to have worked without at least finding out why it has failed!

Yours sincerely,

Guy Chapman