of my faculty colleagues who is a board certified specialist in rehabilitation

medicine as well as pediatrics began reviewing some of his records and based on

those findings we launched a more thorough review of all our patient records at the UAB Spinal Cord Injury Center .

Se

re

e

We found that between September , 1983 and July , 1984 we cared for five patients whose spinal cord injuries resulted from ATV crashes . Three of these victims broke their necks and became quadriplegics ; today they have little or no use of their arms or legs , bladders or bowels , breathing muscles and the like . The

ariis

two other patients broke their backs and became paraplegics . Although one of

our young patients has regained his ability to walk because of his low level injury , he is the exception rather than the rule . He feels so strongly about the dangers of ATVs that he has traveled here today to tell you his personal

story .

The other is confined to a wheelchair and has only limited , non

functional use of his lower extremities .

I hasten to emphasize that while I have described those who became spinal

injured and survived , one of our patient ' s brother who was just eleven and who

was

was riding with our patient on the same vehicle died at the scene of their

same

scene

crash .

A third child , riding aboard the same ATV sustained multiple ortho

paedic injuries . Moreover , I have described only the spinal cord injuries and not the spectrum of serious , associated injuries these young riders sustained .

Beyond this , our statistics , like other statistics of this kind , have not docu mented the hundreds . . . perhaps thousands of serious injuries that result from crashes on these vehicles . Our statistics focus solely on one kind of injury . . . albeit a devastating and catastrophic one . . . the forever paralyzing spinal

cord injury .

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