Drowsy Drivers are a Hazard 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. Check it out at www.yoursecurityandsafety.com/napalarm.htm