A paper titled ‘Risk and protection factors in fatal accidents’ co-authored by E.Dupont, H.Martensen, E.Papadimitriou and G.Yannis was published in the Journal Accident Analysis and Prevention in March 2010. Two methodological issues were specifically discussed, namely the accident-size factors (the number of vehicles in the accident and their level of occupancy) and the comparability of the baseline risk. It is argued that – although these two issues are generally at play in accident severity analyses – their effects on, e.g., the estimation of survival probability, are exacerbated if the analysis is limited to fatal accident data.