NFL Head Injury Settlement "A Travesty"

The settlement that the NFL has reached with former players suffering from concussion-related head injuries “to be blunt, is a travesty,” Joe Nocera writes in The New York Times. It does not cover chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), one of the primary ways that football damages the brain. The judge who approved the settlement said that retired players “cannot be compensated for CTE in life because no diagnostic or clinical profile of CTE exists, and the symptoms of the disease, if any, are unknown.” But Nocera cites at least one doctor as predicting that a test will be available within a decade. “It’s hard not to view the settlement as a cynical effort by the NFL to contain its potential CTE liability,” Nocera writes.