July 4th weekend is a time to celebrate America’s liberty. Yet our liberties don’t include driving while impaired, a misjudgment which claims almost one third of all traffic deaths yearly, and an even higher 40 per cent of all traffic deaths on the mid-summer holiday.

Alcohol abuse by drivers crosses all geographic and socioeconomic lines. But motorcyclists have the highest proportion of alcohol abuse of any drivers on the road, and thus more motorcyclists die in traffic accidents on Independence Day than on any other day of the year.

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Enough is enough. Too many children have died when parents or guardians left them unattended in cars. As summer’s heat rises, such neglect, in effect, is a death sentence. Wake up, America, and don’t ever leave small children behind in a hot vehicle, which one emergency physician says is like “leaving your child in a lit oven.”

Besides protecting the child’s life, you may be helping your own. Increasingly, parents are being arrested and charged with such offenses as child abuse, child neglect or child endangerment. The last can be a felony leading to a jail sentence. Was it worth it to leave the child alone while you went inside a store for some cigarettes?

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Again, tragedy has struck down an innocent child — and again, the tragedy was avoidable. Former heavyweight boxing champ Mike Tyson’s 4-year-old daughter has died, a day after strangling on a cord left dangling from a treadmill at her Phoenix, AZ home.

The treadmill wasn’t turned on, but clearly the cord was still dangerous. Normally such cords are clipped at one end to a treadmill user, so if the person falls, the cord will pull out of the machine at the other end and turn it off. In this case, little Exodus Tyson’s weight apparently wasn’t enough to pull out the cord, which instead became a noose.

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Most parents are extremely protective of kids. But anytime they take them in a car or other vehicle they’re exposing them to the No. 1 killer of America’s children. Indeed, child safety advocate group Safe Kids USA reports that car accidents and other motor vehicle mishaps are the chief cause of child deaths between ages 3 and 14.

That’s confirmed by the National Center for Statistics and Analysis, which says car accidents are the top cause of deaths in kids aged 2-14. The center also says car accidents injure 250,000 American kids yearly. With about 2,000 of them suffering fatal injury, children are the victims in 5 per cent of America’s fatal traffic accidents. And unlike adults, it’s safe to say that no such child has caused the car accident in which he or she died.

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How many wake-up calls does it take to drive home the point that driving is serious business — always? Driving requires your full attention, and that means keeping your hands on the wheel, your eyes on the road and your mind on operating a heavy vehicle at sometimes high speeds in complex traffic.

Apparently a woman in Illinois didn’t think driving required such focus. In fact, she thought driving was incidental to her primary task: painting her nails. And as a result, another woman is dead — an innocent woman who was stopped at a traffic light on her motorcycle and was wearing a helmet but nonetheless perished when a car driven by the nail-painter hit her from behind.

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Teens aren’t going to like it, but what’s to like about being dead? Spurred by the fact that 5,000 teen drivers die annually in traffic accidents — and are 10 times more likely to have a crash than drivers 30-59 years old — some are calling for raising the driving age.

In Texas, that age is now 16. The lowest driving age is 14 years and three months (why the three months extra?) in South Dakota.  The highest driving age is 17, in New Jersey. And what’s happened in Bruce Springsteen country? The number of young drivers killed in teen driving crashes is consistently lower than in neighboring states with lower driving ages.

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With summer winding down, chances are high that most parents aren’t thinking about swimming lessons for their kids. But any time is a good time to help your child protect himself or herself in the water — especially in view of Houston’s recent rash of child drownings.

After a 15-month-old boy drowned when he climbed into a bathtub Aug. 3, already this year Houston has had more child drownings — 25 — than in all of 2007 combined — 22.

Children drown for many reasons, including improperly maintained, supervised and illuminating swimming pools. But as a reader who wrote to this blog has stressed, many such drownings could have been prevented if the child simply knew how to swim properly. (more…)

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