Soccer Safety is Main Topic at Consumer Product Safety Commission Roundtable

SocccerDocs Leads New Trend in Head Protection for Soccer

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The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) will hold a special Chairman's Roundtable on May 2 in Washington D.C. This year's topic, Head Injury and Youth Sports, will mostly focus on head injuries in the game of soccer. The panel will be comprised of medical researchers, academics, youth sports organizations, and safety equipment manufacturers. The CPSC will use the Roundtable discussion to decide whether to advocate head protection for soccer.

The roundtable comes on the heels of a unanimous decision by Wisconsin's Fox Point-Bayside School Board to require all-soft headbands for interscholastic soccer play. The mandate by Fox Point-Bayside Schools is the first of its kind. Schools in other cities are currently considering similar headgear requirements.

St. Paul-based SoccerDocs, Inc. announced that it will participate in this year's CPSC Roundtable. SoccerDocs is the maker of the Headers(R) all-soft(TM) padded soccer headband.

Recent studies and statements by the American medical community have raised awareness of the severity and frequency of head injury in soccer. Statements by leading medical groups include:

• Soccer is the only sport classified by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) as a contact/collision sport that does not require head protection. Football and Hockey are also classified as contact/collision sports.
• A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that participation in soccer is associated with head injury and cognitive impairment.
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates 300,000 sports-related concussions occur per year.
• In a recent statement by the AAP it was estimated that 140,000 to 160,000 soccer-related injuries occur annually and as many as 22 percent of those injuries are head injuries.
• According to the American Academy of Neurology the rate of concussion in soccer is the same as in ice hockey.

In biomechanical tests conducted at the North Dakota State University Impact Biomechanics Laboratory, Headers were shown to reduce the stress of impact to the head by over 50 percent. Headers are the only all-soft padded headbands that have been biomechanically tested and shown to reduce the stress of impact to the head without changing the nature of soccer.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission is an independent federal regulatory agency that was created in 1972 by Congress in the Consumer Product Safety Act. In that law, Congress directed the Commission to "protect the public against unreasonable risks of injuries and deaths associated with consumer products." The CPSC has jurisdiction over about 15,000 types of consumer products, including bike helmets, sporting goods equipment and toys.

Web site: SoccerDocs

CONTACT: Consumer Product Safety Commission

May 1, 2000