Information on all injuries in the US involving an ER visit due to a "product" is accumulated using the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS). Each injury/case to an ER is in theory entered into a computer program by the healthcare professional (nurse, dr., or clerk), using guidelines specified. (NEISS Criteria Manual). Even though this system attempts to identify the "product" associated with the event, one cannot say always that the injury was the "FAULT" of the product; just that it was in use during the injury. For example, falling out of a treestand with bow in hand and dying is put into the same category as getting slapped by a bowstring. One is directly due to the use of the product and the other, not.

The largest problem I immediately encountered in this project is the rudimentary nature of the criteria. The NEISS coding manual has only two designations: 1235 = Archery(Activity, Equipment, or Apparel) and 1338 = Toy Bow or Arrows . That's all the NEISS uses for classification of injuries associated with the sport. Nothing about recurve or compound, hunting or target, carbon or aluminum, target or broadhead, etc.

In email conversations with Arthur McDonald at the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) I found absolutely no interest in the concept of improving the categorization of injuries, so I can only use the limited information by making educated guesses in many cases. The CPSC will, upon request, provide a person with information they have gathered. I received printed brief summaries of injuries covering from 1995 through 2002 and have reviewed more than 350 of them and attempted to get some grasp for what causes injuries in archery.

I also received numerous reports from archers throughout the United States, some purely anecdotal and some providing rather more solid numbers. In most cases they provide more reliable information regarding specific injuries in terms of participants. A year or two back there was an article in the NockNock concerning archery safety. I felt it was of limited use and reliability since no actual numbers of participants were cited. It is one thing to say, for example, that there were an estimated 3,110 archery related injuries in 1998, but the number is nearly meaningless without knowing the total number of archers which those injuries came from. If there are, for example, 3,111 archers in the US then we've got problems! (The number of archers in the US is much higher than that, and the 1998 figure is merely an estimate by the CPSC)

In short, there is NO truly good method in place for identifying the risk of injury for target archery participants. I will devote the next issue of the newsletter to a lengthy summary of what I have been able to glean from the information so far.

For now, coaches and JOAD directors - the most common and avoidable injuries you need to guard against and strive to prevent among your students are string-slap injuries - people actually do present in the ER with bruises on the forearm that caused enough concern to warrant the hassle of the visit to an ER. And with a proper armguard those kind of bruises can be eliminated! It's only common sense that an novice archer who gets hurt by the bowstring will begin to flinch in expectation of pain, and that will NOT improve their aim nor their enjoyment of what should be a fun time.

Of equal importance (and avoidability) is the danger of encountering the nock of the arrow in either the target or as the arrow is being pulled. For complete novices, the most serious insult after string slap is over-draw causing an arrow to hit the bowhand. And closely behind that kind of accident is the overstressing of a cheap fiberglass or too-old wooden bow resulting in shattered limbs and bumps on the arm/head. If someone six feet tall picks up a 4 foot toy bow and draws it to full length, it's pretty much certain that the arrow will slip off the bow, and likely that the extreme stress on the limbs will cause catastrophic failure of the bow. Common sense, right?

This being the outdoor season, no archer should put their scorecard clipboard UNDER the target stand between scoring, yet nearly all do. How smart is this? They should probably be laid, paper down to avoid distracting wind flutter, at least 5 meters in front of the targets and perhaps to one side, so that no one blunders into the nocks as they bend down to pick up the score sheet clipboards. Nocks are very sharp, and account for what are proportionately numerous and totally avoidable facial cuts. I have myself witnessed many archers bumping against the arrows prior to scoring: Oops!<G> So Tournament Directors and Officials, consider making clipboard placement a topic you deal with and you will undoubtedly make it safer for all.

A timeline of English laws pertaining to Archery can be found at this link.

Doesn't pay to be a Welshman nor a Scotsman except on Sundays, apparently.

It is illegal to fish with a bow and arrow in Kentucky.

Illinois: It is unlawful to carry a bow with a nocked arrow in the field, except during legal hunting hours (During Hunting Season)

Other measures to cut down on spam is to change your email often and NEVER post it online - only share it with friends and use a "freebie" address like hotmail.com for your more pedestrian activities online. I find that the free software called mailwasher gives me a sense of control and MAYBE it even reduces spam. Mailwasher allows you to preview your messages while they are still on your ISP's server, and mark the ones you don't want to get. Mailwasher can then email a "BOUNCE" back to those spammers who will often remove the bounce addresses, thinking they are no good. How cool that is!

A number of ISPs, especially Earthlink.net, have started offering a spam filtering service that can be helpful. Just be aware that stupid is as stupid does, to a computer program. That means that the software that chooses what is a spam and what isn't will at some times misidentify good mail as spam. It's not perfect, in other words. Your most reasonable effort is probably just to use the "embedded word" trick in your email address.

As another warning - if you receive an e-mail message with a picture, one even as small as a single pixel (looks like a bold period), the spammer can use the loading of the picture by your software as a trigger to send back a "HERE I AM" message, once again harvesting your email for spam sale. If you use Zone Alarm (and you should, you know - it's free!) then you can have it temporarily lock your internet portal so that as you read your messages, the picture cannot report your information back. That gives you a chance to view the message, and delete it. Then you right-click again on the ZA icon in your system tray, and disengage the lock.

The last step I'll suggest you want to take, in reducing your spam content, is to get another free software that checks your computer for certain spyware softwares which monitor your online activities and silently report that information out over the net to marketing companies who in turn sell it. The problem is that there is no limit to what the softwares might "leak" about you - if the info is on your computer, it can be theirs. Even the keystrokes you enter as passwords can be monitored and tattled. Spyware is one of the most evil forms of software privacy invasion going. Chances are good that if you or anyone in your family has loaded a "free" music sharing utility then your computer is infested. These people make their money, much more money, on gathering what your personal information, likes, preferences, etc. are and selling it, than what they lose in programming the software. Check a list of the utilities you can get to KILL SPYWARE. I find that PestPatrol works quite well, and I gladly paid for a licensed copy of it (It is FREE to try). the maker claims that PestPatrol removes:

* Spyware and adware that "phones home" information about you, your computer, and your surfing habits
* Remote access trojans (RATs) that allow an attacker to remotely control your computer
* Keystroke loggers that can steal passwords and other confidential data
* Denial-of-service (DoS) attack agents that can crash or hang a program, or your entire system
* Probe tools that look for vulnerabilities on your system that a hacker can exploit
And it actually works. Try it for free and see if your computer is infested!

I have set up a postcard snail mailing to go to all 300+ JOAD clubs throughout the US, letting them know about this new free database listing service. CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE FREE database listing service.

Subscribe and see more about the JOAD X FILES NEWSLETTER as well. Use the link to see both past issues as well as sign up for your own free subscription. You are able to opt out anytime you wish and the email address you enter will never be used outside of the Archival Archery & NArchival Archery without your permission. Please have your JOAD archers take a look, and if you have found the information to be of potential use, recommend to them that they subscribe as well. After all, this is your official NArchival Archery JOAD EMAIL NEWSLETTER!

You can use the Google SEARCH box at the very bottom of the main Archival Archery webpage to search for anything you are looking for, on the Archival Archery site, the NArchival Archery site, or even the entire web.
HINT - notice that on the search box your default search will be the Archival Archery website. If you choose the other options, you can search the entire Internet for your term, or (and this is the neat part) you can search the NAA's US ARCHERY SITE! Since the NAA's website does not have a search engine installed, I have long used this to go directly to whatever I want, such as a result or person's name, or "calendar" . It occurred to me that a lot of people have not noticed this long-installed feature even though it has been there for several years...