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The Lightning Solution
Fri Jul 18, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. In our final installment with
lightning-treatment expert Dr. Mary Ann Cooper, she explains the most important safety rule:
don't get struck.
BRYAN: Are we better off now in diagnosing and treating lightning patients than we were 5
years ago?
MARYANN: I think we still don't have a gold standard where we canfor instance like a blood
test where we could draw the blood and say, "'Yep', this person had it and ‘Nope' that person
didn't have it."
Although treatment of lightning injuries has improved dramatically in the past few years, the
key, according to Dr. Cooper, is to keep people from getting hit.
MARYANN: I think we're very far ahead of where we were 5 or 10 years ago because we've raised
the consciousness of this - the recognition of it as an injury. We've got safety plans, we've
got safety awareness in all kinds of venues including rugby and soccer and in pools and park
district managers and outdoors people and backpackers.
I think one of the things that taught me a lesson was some statistics that came out of the
Oklahoma City tornado a few years ago. Not a single person between the ages of about 4 and
the mid 20's had a major injury or death. That's because we taught those kids what to do in
school.
There's always going to be fools out there driving drunk and falling off ladders and kids with
sore throats and people with heart attacks. I'm not going to suffer and go out of business,
but if we can decrease the number of people who are injured by lighting, I'll be very
happy.
The Weather Notebook is a program of the Mount Washington Observatory, online at
www.mountwashington.org. Funding comes from The National Science Foundation and Subaru of
America: Driven by What's Inside.
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