One minute, you are driving along with normal or near-normal visibility, and you can see a few hundred yards in front of your vehicle. Then, suddenly with little or no warning, you can barely see two car lengths in front of your vehicle. If you see taillights, it's probably too late to attempt to stop. This type of nightmare driving condition is common throughout the East Coast and the Appalachians in Georgia, and Easter Sunday, it occurred on the border of North Carolina and Virginia, as the fog closed around dozens of motorists, causing fatal, chain-reaction accidents. Three people were killed and 25 were injured in car and truck accidents involving 95 vehicles. Fog and highway driving makes for a particularly deadly mix, because even if you slow enough to avoid hitting another vehicle, and manage to stop, you have no assurance that any vehicles following yours are going to…

Concussions, especially in sport-related situations, used to be looked at as minor and trivial. If you got up and brushed yourself off, the goal was to get back into the game as soon as possible. Most athletes, and certainly young teens, who are sensitive to the importance of maximizing playing time, could feel pressure to return to the field. There is a growing body of research that indicates that concussions, while not all leading to traumatic brain injury, nonetheless, are not the minor, non-event, that many have been treated as over the years. The ABC news story discusses a girl playing soccer, who suffered three blows to the head within a few days, and ends up "disoriented and having memory lapses." While the coaching staff did not suggest seeing a doctor, the girl eventually told her parents what she was feeling and they took her to a doctor, where she was…

Drunk driving has been subject to a sustained attack on all fronts, from increasingly severe punishments and greater restrictions to a decade's long publicity campaign by organizations like Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). And there has been progress. The decline in highway fatalities has in part been attributed to increased enforcement of drunk driving laws. In 2011, highway deaths fell to 32,367, the lowest number in absolute terms, since recordkeeping of these statistics began in 1949. Nonetheless, in 2010, 31 percent or 10,228 deaths resulted from alcohol-impaired motor vehicle accidents. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes that 30 people die every day in the U.S. in drunk driving accidents. In Columbia County last week, one of those deaths resulted in the conviction of an Evans man. He was charged with first-degree vehicular homicide and running a red light. Prosecutors asked for, and obtained, a 12-year prison sentence…