November 24, 2016 – AssociatedNews.info

Sports November 24, 2016

Emergency Rooms Experience Spike In Football Injuries On Thanksgiving

For a lot of families, one of the rituals of Thanksgiving is playing a little backyard football. That may be why football injuries at the emergency room spike on Thanksgiving every year. FiveThirtyEight reporter Ben Casselman dug into the numbers.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

You probably already know some of the big Thanksgiving safety tips – defrost your bird in the fridge, not on the counter. No frozen turkeys in the deep fryer. Don’t bring up politics around uncle Mike. Well, here’s one more way a lot of people hurt themselves on Thanksgiving – playing football. Ben Casselman learned that lesson the hard way. A few years ago, he was home for the holiday with his family and they assembled in the backyard for a friendly scrimmage.

BEN CASSELMAN: My brother and I are always on opposite teams. And somehow between the two of us the touch football blends into full contact pretty quickly.

SHAPIRO: So maybe it’s not that surprising that one of those games left Ben Casselman with a broken finger.

CASSELMAN: So off I went to the emergency room, where I found a whole collection of other men in their kind of 30s and early 40s, a few years past all of our athletic prime with knee injuries and ankle injuries and finger injuries and generally a lot of people who had maybe overexerted themselves on the backyard gridiron.

SHAPIRO: These days, Ben Casselman is a reporter and editor for the data journalism site fivethirtyeight.com, so he decided to dig into the numbers. The Consumer Product Safety Commission collects statistics on emergency room visits.

CASSELMAN: And it turns out that Thanksgiving is far and away the day which dominates football injuries. There were around a thousand Americans a year who get hurt playing football on Thanksgiving.

SHAPIRO: One-thousand broken, strained and sprained fingers, shoulders, ankles and knees. We should say Casselman only looked at adults age 25 and older, no high school or college games.

CASSELMAN: And this, of course, is just the people who end up in the ER. This isn’t counting all of the – the ankle sprains and whatever else that, you know, you just have a beer and try to forget about.

SHAPIRO: Casselman suspects that most of the victims are, like him, holiday weekend-warrior types.

CASSELMAN: We haven’t been on the football field in a few years. And we go out there and we’re convinced we can still do what we did in our 20s. And it turns out that that’s not as true as it used to be.

SHAPIRO: If you’re wondering how not to become one of those backyard football casualties, we have some tips. Casselman got this advice from a doctor at the hospital where his broken finger was treated.

CASSELMAN: Well, so the big thing he recommended, of course, is that you should get athletic activity throughout the year. But it’s a little too late for that now. So if you’re not an athlete but you’re going to play football anyway, he recommended stretching; he recommended knowing your limits; and he recommended that football first, alcohol second, not the other way around.

SHAPIRO: Thanksgiving words of wisdom from Ben Casselman of FiveThirtyEight.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Business November 24, 2016

After Disorder Threatens Honey Bees, Wild Bees Get More Pollinating Jobs

Beekeepers are still losing honey bees to colony collapse disorder, though the crisis isn’t as bad as a few years ago. Scientists are looking at other kinds of bees to pollinate crops: wild ones.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

OK. Now let’s look at the business of bees. Much of the food on the Thanksgiving table depends on bees for pollination, like the apples in your apple pie, for example. Well, turns out, professional beekeepers have had a rough go recently because of something called colony collapse disorder. Some farmers have been using wild bees as Molly Samuel from member station WABE reports.

MOLLY SAMUEL, BYLINE: Joe Dickey picks apples in his orchard in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Georgia on the Tennessee border.

JOE DICKEY: Right now I’m just kind of lightening the load of these small trees so they won’t break.

SAMUEL: He bought the property more than 50 years ago, when he was 17, with money he saved from shining shoes.

DICKEY: We’ve got a couple of thousand trees now. We’ve got 16 varieties of apples – planted every tree with a shovel.

SAMUEL: One thing Dickey doesn’t need to do is rent honeybees.

DICKEY: I didn’t know I didn’t need to because everybody else was using them.

SAMUEL: The reason he didn’t is because wild bees already swarm his orchard. Honeybees aren’t native to North America. But there are more than 4,000 species of wild bees that are.

NICK STEWART: The first time I came here during bloom was eye-opening for me.

SAMUEL: Nick Stewart studies bees at Georgia Gwinnett College.

STEWART: It looked almost like the entire orchard was kind of on fire a little bit. It was smoking a little bit, like a faint black mist. Get up in there and you actually realize it’s not smoke. It’s just thousands and thousands and thousands of bees. And they’re all native.

SAMUEL: He’s working with his colleague Mark Schlueter to study how more farms can use those wild bees.

MARK SCHLUETER: What we have right here is this wildflower patch.

SAMUEL: Everything is in bloom and vibrating with bees. Schlueter says this is where the science is happening. The idea is to attract wild bees with these flowers when the apple trees aren’t blooming, so that when the trees do Bloom, the insects will already be here, ready to get to work.

SCHLUETER: You can see that they’re – just in a small area, you’ve already seen over a dozen species.

SAMUEL: Bumblebees, carpenter bees, a bright emerald green one with black and yellow stripes that’s a kind of sweat bee. There are similar research projects in other parts of the country, including at big farms out in California. But relying on wild bees isn’t necessarily simple. Different kinds live in different regions and pollinate different things. So it’s not a one-size-fits-all science. Diana Cox-Foster is with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

DIANA COX-FOSTER: It’s not like you can just plug in a wild bee and expect them to be healthy.

SAMUEL: Still, relying on the wild bees is working for apple farmer Joe Dickey. This is his first year he hasn’t used honeybees.

DICKEY: It’s as good a crop as I’ve ever had. And I think maybe that’s due to not as much frost, plus the pollination, you know. But I’m real pleased with my crop this year.

SAMUEL: The scientists say this research isn’t about replacing honeybees. It’s about helping the insects out, having a backup plan and supporting the wildlife that’s been here all along. For NPR News, I’m Molly Samuel in McCaysville, Ga.

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