Since the law requiring motorcycle riders in Florida to wear protective helmets was repealed in 2000, there has been a stunning 81 percent increase in biker deaths.

This year's Bike Week in Daytona Beach was marked by a record 20 deaths, including that of highly regarded Naples businessman and philanthropist Bruce Thalheimer.

The Miami Herald columnist Fred Grimm summed up the madness of this statistic with chilly humor:

"(Twenty) deaths in another sort of festival might raise serious questions about the wisdom of promoting an annual outbreak of utter mayhem. Imagine the pall that (that many) corpses might cast over the Fort Myers Beach Shrimp Festival, the Bonita Springs Art Festival, the Arcadia Rodeo or Jacksonville's All-Florida Championship Cheerleading Challenge. All of these events managed to make it through this past weekend (March 11-12) without a related death.

"In Florida, however, biker deaths are recorded on a different ledger."

Indeed. Since the law requiring motorcycle riders in Florida to wear protective helmets was repealed in 2000, there has been a stunning 81 percent increase in biker deaths. Most of the Bike Week victims were not wearing helmets. Hospitals have complained that many injured riders have disregarded the state requirement that unhelmeted riders have $10,000 in personal injury protection, which wouldn't pay for much care anyway. So those who require care for serious head injuries get it at others' expense.

While the pace of all traffic fatalities in Lee County is down from last year's record, motorcyclists are dying faster: six in 2006 compared to 18 for all of 2005.

A National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study showed that in the three years before helmet-law repeal, 9 percent of the 515 motorcyclists killed in Florida were not wearing a helmet. In the three years after the repeal, 61 percent of the 933 fatally injured motorcyclists were not wearing a helmet.

Hospitals' costs to treat head, brain or skull injuries of motorcyclists more than doubled, from $21 million to $50 million.

Oh well, there's no chance the mandatory helmet law would be resurrected. Even the general public is opposed. In principle, we sympathize with the wish to be free of the nanny state ordering you to protect your noggin, but that makes little sense if you expect the state to cover your head trauma.

We can only recommend that motorcyclists helmet up voluntarily.

And visit floridasafety.org/mclinks.asp to see the Florida Motorcycle Handbook online or to order a copy. The handbook is available in Spanish. The same site also links to the Motorcycle Safety Foundation.