Screening May Save Athletes

In the New York Times article, "Screening May Save Athletes", writer Nicholas Bakalar writes about how screening young athletes with an electrocardiogram can save them. He reports how around 90 young athletes die every year, often from a sudden cardiac death. According to Bakalar screening is a cost-effective way of lowering this number. Bakalar cites the controversy around this being that the cost will be too expensive for the amount of lives it will actually save. An interesting point in this article is that only screening athletes could be discriminatory seeing as how they pretty much just wipe all non-athletes to the side. The main point of this article was to show the effects of what a screening can do towards helping save the lives of athletes.

I believe screening athletes is a great idea no matter what the cost. The fact that money is an issue at all in saving someone's life is mind-boggling. That's like saying "I could save that boys life, but it's too expensive" when you have more than enough money to save him. It has been proven that it works so why wouldn't you do it? In my opinion screening is perfect if it can save any amount of life at all.