It’s been a hot topic in the snow-sports safety forum for best part of ten years now – the issue of helmets. High velocity collisions with trees lead to the deaths of Sonny Bono and Michael Kennedy in 1998 and raised the profile of head injuries on the slopes in the media...Most recently, the debate was reignited after the tragic death of actress Natasha Richardson (Liam Neeson's wife) whilst skiing in Canada.

To add fuel to the initial fire, the US Government got on the bandwagon and commissioned the controversial CPSC study which in January 1999 concluded that more than 7,000 head injuries on the slopes each year in the USA could be prevented or reduced in severity by the use of a helmet.

Whilst this publication has been widely quoted in many subsequent publications and on the surface seems to make a conclusive case, this study has been criticised by most leading ski injury researchers (including Bob Johnson & Rick Greenwald) as being politically motivated.

To cut a long story short, the current evidence strongly suggests that helmets may prevent or reduce the severity of many minor/moderate head injuries but there is no data to support the idea that they will protect against fatal head injuries - the forces involved in these sort of accidents are simply too great...

... the real issue is that of risk calculation - i.e. how likely is a head injury to occur? It would appear to be actually very low.