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SATURDAY, JUNE 3, 1961 NOTICED by most of us, great strides have been made in reducing accidents and enough proof now exists that accidents are preventable that, if we followed some simple rules, we could save ourselves much misery. Unfortunately, most of us are still ignoring the facts. As a result, accidents are the leading single cause of death in children between birth. and 15 years of age, and are expected shortly to be the principal death cause right up to the age of 20. No one knows how much injury, major and minor, that they cause. And it is particularly obvious that the ordinary man in the street (and woman) is responsible for most of our failure to deal with accidents properly. For instance, in industries, which have far more potentially dangerous ma- chinery than homes, the accident rate has been .coming down amazingly. But homes re- ' main 'the most dangerous place in the world. On the highway, the number of accidents is a national disgrace. Yet the men who drive the big trucks and buses are not part of this sorry picture, Lots of them drive 25 years without a single accident. If we continue losing as many people in small boat accidents as we are beginning to do (thanks to the rising popularity of boating) we'll wind up losing more people a year in this way than the Navy lost to enemy action during the war. The reason the Navy, big industries, bus lines and trucking fleets have fewer accidents and disasters than the man in the street is easy to see. It is simply that they prevent situations in which accidents are likely to happen. Forethought can prevent accidents, but first ONTARIO TODAY you must adopt the modern concept about accidents. WO months ago the baby daughter of a friend of mine ate a bottle of headache tablets. Her mother didn't at first realize what had happened, though she knew the baby was sick. She put the child to bed, thinking she had a slight stomach upset. A few hours later, at one o'clock in the morning, the mother found the empty bottle of aspirin and realized what: had really happened. But the child didn't seem much worse, so she took no action. Twelve hours later, the baby was dead. An accident? Not really. First, the tablets should not have been where the baby could reach them. They should have been locked up. Secondly, when the mother found the aspirin bottle empty she could have phoned her doctor (even at one a.m. he would have liked to know) or she could have phoned any hospital, where a staff is available all night. Thirdly, she could have (and should have) had on hand a baby book that probably would have told her the danger. In any case, consider- ing how much has been published about the risk of headache tablets to small children, she should have been aware of the hazard. Let's face it, if mankind is the smartest creature on earth, this mother didn't do much toward proving it. Men like Gordon Anderson, of the Indus- trial Accident Prevention Association of On- tario can prove conclusively that accidents can mostly be prevented if you're determined. First of all, learn to look on accidents as things that happen, not by chance, but because a situation existed in which they were possible. In other words, look for what Mr. Anderson calls "accident-prone situations." Years ago, when experts first began seriously tackling this problem of accidents, there was a lot of talk about "accident prone people". Today, says Mr. Anderson, they don't look for accident-prone people. From a practical point of view, there aren't any. What is an accident-prone situation? It is any situation in which an accident is likely to happen. There are literally thousands of such situations. In industry, the biggest single remaining cause of accidents is in one particu- lar situation: a man on a machine is anxious. to keep up his work schedule, a piece of lint or some other foreign substance gets into the machine while it is running, so the man reaches in to remove it without shutting off the machine. A silly action? Yes But if these workers realized that this is the biggest single cause of accidents in industry today, perhaps they would list it as Accident-Prone Situation No. 1 and take due warning. HREE of the most deadly things in thz home: boiling cooking fat, drain cleaners (chemical) and "something on the stairs." These are accident-prone situations of the first order. Even today, few people seem fully aware of the great danger of caustic drain cleaners. Even a little left on the skin can cause a great, ugly, painful ulcer. A child that swallows this material is doomed either to death or to months in hospital. For years, hospitals all over the country have been counting their quota of chil- dren who swallow string slowly, week after week in an effort to reopen closed gullets, horribly burned and mutilated. Yet mothers still keep caustic drain cleaners "under the sink." CONTINUED ON PAGE 23