Personal Injury Blog

Seatbelt usage among Nevada motorists is at all-time highs, although the numbers could possibly be greater. However, in one category of motorists, seat belt usage rates have remained consistently low. Teen motorists have lower seatbelt rates compared to adult motorists, and this places them at serious risk of being injured or even killed when they are involved in an accident.

The Governors Highway Safety Association recently released a report titled Getting It to Click: Connecting Teens and Seatbelts. The agency examined effective programs that could help teens buckle in. The report analyzed the best and most effective seatbelt enforcement programs from around the country, and promising new programs that are currently being implemented in several states, and made recommendations for the success of such teen safety programs.

The GHSA panel found that the most effective programs to get more teenagers to wear seatbelts, include stronger laws, requiring teenagers to buckle up while driving, as well as better law enforcement and peer-to-peer efforts. Other elements of an effective seatbelt enforcement program for teenagers were greater participation of parents in getting teenagers to buckle up while driving, community participation, use of social media because teenagers are heavy users of Facebook, incentive programs and other resources targeting diverse audiences.

Targeting teenage motorists has never been easy. This is a demographic that has a very low attention span, and targeting adult motorists can be much more much easier and less complicated. The report suggests that states use not just one of the strategies, but a combination of all of the strategies to reach the maximum number of teenage motorists, and increase seatbelt rates.

Seatbelts have saved thousands of lives in accidents, since these became mandatory on all automobiles. However, researchers have found that the best strategy to prevent injuries in an accident, is a combination of airbags and seatbelts.

As many as 7,500 fatal car accidents every year can be directly linked to drowsy driving. That is a much higher number than has been earlier estimated, and indicates the seriousness of these accidents.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its recent Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report focused on the risk behaviors and predictors of drowsy driving. The study actually found that drowsy drowsing is much more common among persons who drink excessively, or binge on alcohol, compared to those who abstain from alcohol or drink moderately.

According to the CDC, drowsy driving was also found to be much more prevalent among persons who never wear their seatbelts or rarely wear their seatbelts, compared to those who regularly wear their seatbelts while riding or driving. Persons, who reported falling asleep in the daytime, snoring, or sleeping less than six hours at night, were much more likely to report drowsy driving.

While the sleep deprivation factors make sense, it is interesting to note that persons who drink excessively, or those who do not wear their seatbelts, may also be at a higher risk of drowsy driving. Both of these are dangerous driving practices, and there seems to be a link between these practices and the equally dangerous practice of driving when you are too sleepy to do so.

Tackling drowsy driving should be an even bigger challenge for Las Vegas authorities, because the laws here do not ban drowsy driving like they do driving under the influence of alcohol. In fact no state except New Jersey has tackled driving while fatigued because of a number of reasons, not least being the difficulty in measuring how sleepy a person is at the wheel. Drowsy driving is a widely common phenomenon, and many motorists who do not drive while drunk, will admit to driving when they are too sleepy to keep their eyelids open.

Spurred by fears that the recommended dose of the popular sleep medication Lunesta could possibly impair driving abilities increasing accident risks, the federal administration has moved to lower the recommended dose of the drug.

According to the Food and Drug Administration, its action is based on a study that it conducted which found that persons, who used Lunesta just before bedtime, had serious problems with driving the next day. These people continued to suffer from the effects of this medication up to 11 hours after they took the pill. The next morning they struggled with tasks including memory and coordination. These persons were very often unaware of the side effects of the drug. They remained unaware about their impaired driving abilities.

The study was published last month, and in the study, researchers compared 91 patients, who were on Lunesta or a placebo. The patients were monitored when they were performing several tasks, and researchers found that persons who took Lunesta definitely had trouble performing tasks, that measured memory and coordination.

As a result of that study, Sunovion Pharmaceuticals Inc. which manufactures Lunesta has lowered the starting dose of the drug from 2 mg to 1 mg. Doctors can make the decision to bump patients up from 1 mg to 3 mg, but doctors must remember that the increased recommended dose will only increase the risk of impaired ability the next day.

Prescription drug use or misuse can be a serious contributor to distracted driving accidents. A person who is driving under the influence of sleep medication, and many other drugs that cause drowsiness like antihistamines, antihypertensives, and antidepressants, may suffer from impaired driving abilities, and not even know it.