"Here’s a US import Britain should ban – and it’s not Donald Trump."

I don't have any kids, but I understand why those of you who do rightly seek to protect them from things like drug use at an early age, as we know how this can damage the brain. But knowing what we do now about brain injuries and football, it's unclear to me why we're still encouraging it.

Here’s a US import Britain should ban – and it’s not Donald Trump, by Martin Kettle (The Guardian)

We can embrace presidential elections and the Oscars, but the NFL is too dangerous to adopt ... the problem about American football is that it’s way too dangerous for the players. As the Packers coach Vince Lombardi (the Super Bowl is played for a trophy in his name) once put it: “Football is not a contact sport; it is a collision sport.” In a long career, a successful player can expect to endure more than 70,000 blows. Most of all, this means blows to the head, and repeated concussions. Current estimates, according to the writer and Packers fan David Maraniss, are that nearly 30% of all NFL players will suffer some form of dementia after playing the game. NFL players are up to 19 times more likely than the rest of the population to suffer this condition.