How many motor vehicle accidents are due to sleepiness?
Dr. Rosekind: Just recently a group of scientists got together, and we estimated that fatigue plays a role in ten to twenty percent of all accidents in all modes of transportation. Most of the published official Government estimates underestimate fatigue. And the reason for that is that we don’t have a blood test the way we do alcohol or drugs to be able to say that’s what caused the accident. You would have to know how long they’d slept, how long were they awake, what time of day was it—and without that we typically underestimate whether fatigue played a role or not. I think people are looking for a way to measure fatigue, either by measuring our blood or testing how we might use technology to figure out whether people are too tired to drive, to fly, or to perform a safety-sensitive job. We know that it’s a big issue, because even the official estimates suggest that there are at least a 100,000 accidents in the United States every year, 71,000 injuries and probably 1,500 fatalities du
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