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Dr . GREENSHER . Both . I am testifying as chairman of the commit tee and personally . Mr . BARNARD . Thank you , sir .

Dr . GREENSHER . We are greatly concerned about the increasing price that our children are being asked to pay for the thrill of mo bility . The desire to be carried at a greater speed than our legs allow has spurred on the imagination of inventors and industry and an ever - growing number of vehicles are being put on the market that leave behind them a toll of broken bodies and unac ceptable debts . You have already heard data , and more will be forthcoming today , on the injuries associated with the all - terrain vehicle .

Some question has been raised about why are we picking on this when there are a larger number of deaths from bicycles , larger number of deaths from poison . I don ' t have to apologize for being here . Our committee started in 1953 as the first established effort to secure information on product - related injury in children . We are very aware of the bicycle problem . We have worked very hard on the bicycle problem for over 20 years , Mr . Chairman .

If you looked at the bicycle today and looked at a bicycle as it existed in 1953 , you wouldn ' t recognize them as the same vehicles .

This has taken on enormous changes . There are 100 million bikes in use today . If one extrapolated the bicycle numbers to the num bers on the ATV ' s , certainly the toll that we are seeing today would be totally unacceptable . We have worked very hard with the Consumer Product Safety Commission for 10 years . There is a mountain of literature on bicycles , on boat safety , on swimming safety . I participated in a session that took place last Tuesday spon sored by the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the spa and pool industry on swimming and diving safety . The only thing , Mr . Chairman , members of the committee , is in spite of all of these efforts there is still unacceptable tolls because a lot of this is still voluntarism and it is a slow process .

I have to tell you we were taken totally by surprise with the data that came out on the ATV ' s . Our committee was still very inno cently working away on the two - wheel problem . Just learning the variety of vehicles that are available out there , such as minibikes and trail bikes and small motorcycles , is almost a full - time job . The one thing that we are sure about all of those , the one thing that they do have in common is an ever - increasing incidence of injuries and deaths associated with their use .

We were shocked and surprised , as all of you must be , when we saw the data that is being presented today . The rising toll of emer gency room injuries to 67 , 000 in 1984 for the ATV . Now I under stand the deaths has climbed as high as 165 , so the last figure that we had heard is probably wrong already . This has driven us to a very urgent appeal to you . We were particularly disturbed by the Alaska experience , which listed the data from January of 1983 to December of 1984 reporting 538 injuries , 20 deaths , 6 permanently disabled by neurological injuries resulting from the ATV accidents . Children 10 to 14 years of age numbered 24 percent of those that were reported by police in that Alaska series .

The further significance of the rising toll of crippling injuries came from the report of five instances of ATV - caused spinal cord