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Sleep Deprivation Tough to Prove in Traffic Accidents, Says Springfield PD

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Driving while drowsy or sleep deprived can be as dangerous as drunk driving. A 2005 study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found over 100,000 police-reported crashes are a direct result of driver fatigue each year.

But the estimated 1,550 deaths, 71,000 injuries and $12.5 billion in monetary losses might be underreported statistics, because it is still difficult to attribute crashes to sleepiness.

Lisa Cox, public affairs officer for the Springfield police department, says that its office doesn’t keep data on sleep fatigue for non-fatal crashes. She said that sleep deprivation is sometimes listed as a probable cause, but is hard to prove on-scene.

“A lot of time it is a matter of what the person told the officer or what any witnesses saw,” Cox said. “Or if there happens to be any surveillance cameras around”

The Springfield News-Leader reported Monday that sleep fatigue is listed as a factor in the case of a 17-year-old, who late last month drove off the road from East Sunshine Street, hitting and killing a 39-year old man in a wheelchair.

Currently there are no scientific ways to test for sleep deprivation, such as how a breathalyzer tests blood alcohol content.

“Typically driver fatigue is not something you hear as often causing a fatality crash, but we don’t know if that is the whole story,” she said.

Many times, blood alcohol content and/or drug use can overshadow the effects of drowsiness as cause for an accident.

According to the Archives of Internal Medicine, drunk driving and driving while fatigued were equally risky. Both doubled the chance of being in an accident. 

A study shows that after 17 to 19 hours without sleep, performance was equivalent or worse than that of a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) level of 0.05 percent. After longer periods without sleep, performance reached levels equivalent to a BAC of 0.1 percent.

This means that skipping even one sleep cycle in a 24-hour period can render someone incapable of driving a vehicle.

According to the National Sleep Foundation, adults between the ages of 18-29 are much more likely to drive while drowsy compared to other age groups. Furthermore, people who sleep six to seven hours night are twice as likely to be involved in such a crash as those sleeping eight hours or more.

Missouri currently doesn’t have any laws in place to reduce the number of sleep fatigued drivers. States like New Jersey, however, have laws where driving without sleep for 24 hours is considered to be driving recklessly; the same class as an intoxicated driver.