Daily Archives: March 6, 2006

Obese or Skinny?

This entry was posted in Health Care Law on by

If you are too skinny or too heavy you have a higher risk of fatal injury in certain car crashes(reg):

Male drivers with a body-mass index (BMI) greater than 35 or lower than 22 were significantly more likely to die after front-end or left-side collisions, compared with men with intermediate BMIs, reported Shankuan Zhu, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues at the Medical College of Wisconsin here.
Moderately overweight men (with BMIs around 28) were least likely to die, compared with their larger or skinnier counterparts,

One reason is that vehicles are not designed for you:

Current vehicle cabin designs are based on a standard crash test dummy in the driver’s position with a BMI of 24.3, the authors said.
“These cabin designs may not be optimal for drivers with a different body habitus and may contribute to the higher fatality seen at both ends of the BMI continuum,” the authors concluded.

This seems another good incentive to maintain yourself in reasonably good shape!

I wonder, though, if we will start seeing law suits by families of dead heavyweights claiming unsafe design or misrepresentations about safety.

Sex: Hell yes! Control of Others: Hell No!

This entry was posted in Regulation on by

Read each and every one of these posts: Digby, Amanda, Avedon, Tena and Echidne. They chew up and spit out a daft person who argues that complete abstention is a woman’s only answer to unwanted pregnancy.
Echidne, closes her fine piece with the following:

The truth of course is that our choices do matter, but they matter in a probabilistic sense, not in the sense of being meted awards and punishments by some cruel wingnut god. And humans are human, which means that none of us can control everything in our lives. Not even wingnuts can do that, though they would love to control other people’s lives.

Sadly, wanting to control other people’s lives does little to differentiate wingnuts from the common liberal. For example, with respect to the war on drugs wingnut and liberal politicians are pretty much indistinguishable. Combine the wingers and the liberals together the result is a beast that would have every aspect of your life under tight reign.

Originally via Atrios.