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What to Do
About Drowsy Drivers
Who Cause A
Carnage On the Highway
One of the ugly little
secrets about highway safety is the incidence of
drowsy drivers and the havoc they cause to
themselves and others on the highway.
The National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration points to drowsy
driving as a factor in more than 100,000 crashes
annually, resulting in 1,550 deaths and 40,000
injuries. And they say that is “probably a
conservative figure.”
An organization called
the National Sleep Foundation puts the figures
much higher: more than 5,500 deaths and 71,000
injuries.
If that doesn’t scare
you off the highway at night, nothing much
will.
All it would take to
save so many of those lives would be for drivers
to utilize a product out there called a Nap
Alarm. It would prevent them from dozing off.
The driver wears it in the ear, and if his or
her head droops, an alarm sounds in the vehicle
that awakens the driver and anyone else asleep.
Some of the most
spectacular accidents occur when commercial
truck drivers, behind the wheel of huge semis,
fall asleep and plow into a lineup of cars
stopped at a light, causing a carnage. It
happens a number of times each year. The
innocent drivers at the wheels of their cars
never knew what hit them.
There have been many
controversies regarding commercial truck drivers
who must conform to company or union rules
regarding the number of hours they can
(sometimes must) be behind the wheel of their
trucks daily. Why wouldn’t they want to protect
themselves and the public with a simple rule:
“Always wear a Nap Alarm”?
Consider this: a
spokesperson for the Division of Sleep Medicine
at Harvard University Medical School says that
250,000 drivers fall asleep at the wheel daily.
Yes, that’s daily. He adds: “there’s an
epidemic of drowsy driver crashes, particularly
among young people.”
A National Sleep
Foundation study revealed that 54% of all
drivers said they had driven while drowsy and
28% said they had actually fallen asleep.
Several states have
considered criminalizing drowsy driving in fatal
crashes; one state actually has taken the step –
New Jersey.
Yet, it would be so easy
to recommend to all drivers, commercial or not,
to slip a Nap Alarm into their ears when
entering a car or truck at night if there is any
chance of nodding off to sleep. They are small,
lightweight, unobtrusive.
There is no getting
around it – drowsy drivers have slow reaction
times. A study by the AAA Foundation for
Traffic Safety revealed that persons who got 7
or fewer hours of sleep are twice as likely to
cause a motor vehicle accident as those who get
8 hours of sleep. And when the sleep time slips
below five hours, the crash risk increases four
to five times.
Many drivers who cause
accidents by falling asleep are known to be
victims of a disease known as sleep apnea. Data
traced back to the year 2000, for instance,
blames sleep apnea for 1,400 deaths in
car-related accidents and that a total of more
than 800,000 drivers with sleep apnea were
involved in car accidents that year. These
figures are from the National Safety Council.
Fortunately, sleep apnea
is a treatable disease. There have been studies
that indicate patients with sleep apnea who
submit to recommended treatment procedures, such
as the use of CPAP devices at night, have
contributed to a reduction in accidents
involving these kinds of patients.
But even those who
suffer from sleep apnea can benefit from a Nap
Alarm. |
