Two weeks ago, a Meridian High School football player suffered an injury during a game, with emergency medical personnel taking more than 25 minutes to arrive, according to the team’s head coach. It was reportedly the second such delay in two weeks. While the injury was not necessarily related to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), it served as a stark reminder of the immediate physical dangers associated with the sport and raised serious questions about emergency medical preparedness at high school athletic events.

Someday in the distant future, perhaps, the present-day unrelenting obsession of American society with the potentially deadly consequences of football will be recognized for the utter and immoral stupidity that it represents.

We all love football, but the mounting scientific evidence linking repeated head impacts to the degenerative brain disease CTE should give us serious pause. Yet very few among us seem willing to respond like rational human beings, and so the sport, and its potential for premature suffering and death, go on.

A study published Aug. 25, 2026, in the prestigious medical journal The BMJ, conducted by researchers affiliated with Boston University and other institutions, found a minimum CTE prevalence of 24.5 percent among former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021. Of 878 deceased players, researchers examined 235 donated brains and confirmed CTE in 215. While these findings do not establish how common the disease is among all football players, particularly at the high school level, they provide troubling evidence of the neurological consequences associated with the sport.

Someday, efforts like those at Boston University may give us a reliable way to diagnose the illness in living persons. Currently, we cannot definitively confirm CTE in the living. Someone has to die before we can know for sure.

Even in an enlightened community like Virginia’s City of Falls Church, with its strong emphasis on education and intellectual achievement, the dangers associated with football receive far too little public scrutiny. The sport remains a fixture at Meridian High School, despite mounting scientific evidence linking repeated head impacts to CTE.

The former superintendent and current principal have both acknowledged to this writer, in face-to-face conversations, that they have no clear answers to the concerns surrounding football and the long-term neurological risks to student-athletes. Yet the sport continues largely unchanged. Simply developing safer helmets is not enough. While improved equipment can help reduce certain injuries, it cannot eliminate the repeated head impacts associated with CTE.

For decades, CTE has been a ghostly diagnosis, a degenerative brain disease whose presence can only be suspected in life and definitively proven after death. Associated with repetitive head impacts, CTE has cast a long shadow over contact sports, military service and victims of repeated physical abuse.

However, the scientific landscape is shifting. Researchers are investigating advanced PET scans and blood-based biomarkers that could eventually allow CTE to be diagnosed in living patients. Such a breakthrough could open new possibilities for treatment, prevention and a better understanding of the disease, while introducing profound psychological, financial and ethical questions that society may be ill-prepared to handle.

A reliable diagnosis could force athletes, parents, schools and professional sports organizations to confront the neurological risks of continued participation. It could also raise serious questions about insurance, liability and the future of contact sports.

Yet diagnosis would not mean a cure. No treatment has been proven to stop or reverse CTE, and the psychological consequences of learning one has an incurable neurological disease could be devastating.

Ultimately, the prospect of diagnosing CTE in the living offers genuine scientific hope. It promises greater clarity for families who have suffered through years of uncertainty. But science must move forward with caution, and society must finally confront the human cost of the games it continues to celebrate.