Here is an interesting online article about helmet standards. One of the issues on child safety is whether children should be wearing helmets and if yes, then what helmets are safe for them to wear? Here is the link to the article:

A comparison of bicycle helmet standards

There was a lively discussion about which helmets are appropriate for children during a recent seminar I attended in Bangkok on safe journeys between the home and school. In Vietnam, for example, most children wear a child-sized helmets that are lighter than the ones adults use. In other countries, children wear bicycle helmets, which are even lighter but which some experts deem to be unsafe if used on motorcycles. In our case, most children don’t even wear helmets! That is definitely not safe even if the motorcycle speeds are low as children are more vulnerable than adults in these situations. We do have helmet standards in the Philippines (refer to Bureau of Product Standards) but these are for adult sizes and adult use rather than for children.

A common sight in the Philippines is parents taking their children to school on a motorcycle.  Note that both children are not wearing any protective gear.

It would be nice to conduct a survey on helmet use for schoolchildren in the Philippines. We often make observations and provide anecdotal evidence on use/non-use but we don’t have the numbers to substantiate this issue. While, multiple passengers on motorcycles (e.g., a parent taking his/her child or children to school) is basically unsafe, it is widespread in the Philippines and surprisingly have not led to a high incidence of crashes involving them. Well, at least, not that we know of based on news reports and whatever available statistics are there. I guess that underlines the need to have better data collection and statistical analysis for this but that’s another story…

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