Harry Potter: healthy read

It’s not wizardry, but Harry Potter apparently protects his legions of youthful fans from injuries, at least during the weekends his newest books keep them huddled indoors on reading marathons, British researchers said.

Stephen Gwilym of John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford and his colleagues counted how many children, aged 7 to 15, came to the emergency room on weekends when J.K. Rowling’s two most recent tomes were released and compared them with other summer weekends from 2003 to 2005.

The number of children brought in with injuries during the weekends “The Order of the Phoenix” and “The Half-Blood Prince” were released was about half the usual – lower than any other weekend in the three-year period.

“It may therefore be hypothesized that there is a place for a committee of safety-conscious writers who could produce high quality books for the purpose of injury prevention,” the researchers wrote in the British Medical Journal. They noted, however, that “potential problems with this project would include an unpredictable increase in childhood obesity, rickets, and loss of cardiovascular fitness.”