Volume 3, No. 2. January 24, 2002
Eric's Turn
Hogwash
I have been thinking a lot this week about plastic cutting boards.
I don’t have any (we have wood cutting boards in our kitchen), but that’s
not the point. A few years ago I remember reading of a study about germs on
cutting boards. You see, the manufacturers of plastic cutting boards touted
not only the price and convenience of their boards, but their sanitary quality.
It was obvious to anybody that germs were more likely to thrive on wood than
plastic, but the manufacturers still commissioned a lab to reach that conclusion
scientifically. The lab discovered the opposite: bacteria thrived on plastic,
but died on wood. The manufacturers released the results.
So, to anybody who doubts the validity of the two studies financed by Six Flags,
I say, to quote Robert “Hoot” Gibson, “Hogwash.” Six Flags
took a risk no other company was willing to take publicly in going to sources
outside the industry for such a study. No matter the results, it was a wise
move. To be fair, other operators just didn’t see the point of such studies,
even in the face of increasing public and media pressure. One hundred years
of experience and an incredible safety record that comes only with the degree
of scientific and medical research the industry already undertakes seemed incontestable.
As J. Clark Robinson, president of IAAPA, put it so succinctly after Tuesday’s
press conference releasing the results of the two Six Flags studies: “You
have a death at your park, you have a huge economic impact it takes years to
recover from.”
Well, that’s obvious. Yet the whole nature of this how-safe-are-we argument
is all about stating the obvious, for both sides of the issue. At its very core,
this is a debate in which people look at 200-foot-high coasters on which riders
in nothing more than go-karts are whipped about on relatively thin rails and
those people ask the obvious: “How can it be safe?” Builders and operators
of those coasters endure tests and checks and redundancies and then watch thousands
of passengers take hundreds of cycles and state the obvious: “How can it
not be safe?”
One precious plastic-cutting-board moment in Tuesday’s press conference
came when a reporter asked Robert Harbaugh of the American Association of Neurological
Surgeons to comment on Representative Ed Markey’s seemingly commonsense
assertion that today’s bigger, faster coasters must create more g-forces
and therefore be unsafe: “For every common question, there is a simple,
compelling answer that’s wrong,” Harbaugh replied. Both his association’s
study and that by the engineers at Exponent had discovered that despite coasters
getting higher and faster, their g-forces are not increasing.
I can’t help wondering if the researchers often asked, “Why are we
here?” The Exponent engineers appeared to be having at least a little fun
smacking each other with pillows (above), and for the first time we have some
real scientific data on the physics of longstanding coasters. But the neurologists
had to sift through libraries of medical case studies—particularly the
oft-cited 20 possible cases of brain injuries occurring among, by conservative
count, 60 billion coaster cycles over 20 years—to determine whether the
United States was facing a public health crisis. Twenty in 60 billion is a public
health crisis? The neurologists determined only nine cases were plausibly connected
to coasters, meaning they may or may not have been related.
The medical community looks at nine in 60 billion (even 20 in 60 billion) and
sees no cause for alarm. The media looks at one in hundreds of billions and
sees news.
Therein lies the danger of this ongoing debate, pointing to what is truly the
greater public health risk and why the results of the Six Flags study could
have an important impact far beyond our own industry. Harbaugh described how
he recently treated a young man with a two-week history of headaches. The man
had a subdural hematoma. Upon asking the patient if he had experienced any recent
trauma, the man cited riding a roller coaster four months earlier. “He
was convinced that this was the cause of his subdural hematoma as he had read
about the risks of riding a roller coaster,” Harbaugh said. “If the
statement that roller coasters frequently cause neurological injuries is repeated
often enough, even if not true, the reported incidence of ‘roller coaster
related neurological injuries’ will increase because more patients and
physicians will inaccurately assign a causal relationship between riding a roller
coaster and a subsequent neurological event.”
That’s not just bad science, that’s bad medicine.
©2002, Minton Enterprises
LLC
All rights reserved