Well, you’re wrong. Most motorcyclists killed in accidents receive too many internal injuries to be of any use as donors. Those are the facts. That is nothing more than a flippant comment used purely to demean and insult. Stop using the term unless that is your purpose.
You are wrong.
Motorcycle Helmets and Donor Organs
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/motorcycle-helmets-and-donor-organs/
Helmet or no helmet? That’s a hotly debated topic in the world of motorcycle riding. Last week, Daniel Hamermesh, a frequent guest blogger at Freakonomics, joined in the discussion.
Mr. Hamermesh linked to a recent unpublished study that show that states that repeal mandatory helmet laws experience a rise in organ donations from motor vehicle fatalities.
The link between helmet laws and donor organs is not a new one. Jerry Garrett wrote about this topic last year for Wheels. In his post, a surgeon recalled a discussion she had with two colleagues before California enacted its mandatory helmet law.
“Motorcycle fatalities are not only our number one source of organs,” said one surgeon. “They are also the highest-quality source of organs, because donors are usually young, healthy people with no other traumatic injuries to the body, except to the head.”
The study, “Donorcycles: Do Motorcycle Helmet Laws Reduce Organ Donations?” [pdf] by Stacy Dickert-Conlin, Todd Elder and Brian Moore from Michigan State University, takes a look at this link. Here is the abstract:
Government traffic safety mandates are typically designed to reduce the harmful externalities of risky behaviors. We consider whether motorcycle helmet laws also reduce a beneficial externality by decreasing the pool of viable organ donors. Our central estimates show that organ donations due to motor vehicle fatalities increase by 10 percent when states repeal helmet laws. Two characteristics of this association suggest that it is causal: first, nearly all of it is concentrated among men, who account for over 90 percent of all motorcyclist deaths, and second, helmet mandates are unrelated to organ donations due to circumstances other than motor vehicle accidents. Our estimates imply that every death of a helmetless motorcyclist prevents or delays as many as 0.33 deaths among individuals on organ transplant waiting lists.
In the study’s conclusion, its authors note that motorcyclist fatalities decline by 30 percent when mandatory helmet laws are enacted. Currently, only three states do not have helmet laws, though many states require helmets only for those under the age of 18. According to this article from The Times last year, the rate of motorcycle fatalities is steadily rising.