Friday, September 19, 2008

Outdoor Injuries

Those of you with no interest in numbers may choose to read no further. If you're still reading, these stats come from Wilderness and Environmental Medicine (the official publication of the Wilderness Medical Society), 19, 91-98 (2008)--and you're going to learn about the number of outdoor injuries in 2004 and 2005. During those 2 years, an estimated 212,708 injuries were sustained in outdoor activities and treated in hospitals. Sounds like a lot, yes, but the stats include just about any activity you can think of including skiing, horsepacking, skydiving, and snowmobiling. Lower limbs were involved in 27% of the injuries, upper limbs in 25%, and the head and neck in 23.3%. The most common diagnoses were fractures (27.4%) and strains or sprains (23.9%). Males were injured in 68.2% of the accidents. The most dangerous activity? Snowboarding, with a whopping 53,996 estimated annual injuries. Second was sledding, which includes sliding down snowy hillsides on tubes and disks (22,780 annual injuries), and third was hiking (13,448) which included anyone out for a walk anywhere outdoors. Short version: It's statistically much safer on ground than snow. For more info, check out www.wms.org.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Bleached Water

Someone recently asked if he could use household bleach to disinfect water on the trail. The short answer is "yes." Here's more info: Household bleach typically runs about 5% chlorine. We know that 0.1 ml to 0.2 ml of 5% chlorine bleach added to a liter of water will disinfect it, if you wait about a half hour, killing everything except Cryptosporidium (and it may take an hour or more to kill Giardia). A problem arises in measuring bleach into a water bottle. You can use a measured dropper, one that tells you how much fluid is being dropped, and that's the only way to be sure of your measurement. Others guess at the amount, using a non-measured dropper and estimating that a standard "drop" will be about 0.04 ml. Guessers often add 8 drops of bleach per liter of water in an attempt to be safe rather than sorry. The result is water tasting nastily of bleach, but it won't hurt you. Frankly, even though bleach is cheap, I'd rather use a product that guarantees safe water, such as chlorine dioxide tablets (www.rei.com/product/736898).