Potter magic helps accident-prone children

Boy wizard Harry Potter has already cast his spell on millions worldwide, but new research shows his magic has a hitherto unimagined effect.

He has been shown to protect accident-prone children.

Researchers at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford studied attendance records for children aged 7 to 15 years at the hospital’s emergency department over summer weekends between 2003 and 2005.

They found that the number nearly halved on the two weekends in June 2003 and July 2005 when “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” and “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” were published.

“We observed a significant fall in the numbers of attendees to the emergency department on the weekends that the two most recent Harry Potter books were released,” they wrote in Friday’s edition of the British Medical Journal—its traditionally lighter-weight year-end issue.

They suggested that teams of talented writers could be recruited to produce similar books for the purpose of what they termed “distraction therapy” to prevent injuries.

But such therapies were not without their own risks in the age of the couch potato. “Potential problems with this project would include an unpredictable increase in childhood obesity, rickets and loss of cardiovascular fitness,” they warned.

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