Legislation aimed at improving California’s poor record in protecting student athletes from sudden cardiac arrest, or SCA, won passage recently from a legislative policy committee. AB 2009 would require school districts and charters that participate in interscholastic athletics to have at least one automatic external defibrillator, or AED, at each school site. The bill also calls on districts to have a written emergency action plan that directs the use of the ADE, and to have adopted policies that protect coaches or trainers from liability for using the life-saving tool.
According to the bill’s author, 42 young athletes in California died while engaged in physical activity between 2009 and 2011, and among those cases where a cause of death was released, 68 percent were attributed to sudden cardiac arrest.
