Dangerous Truck Drivers Admit that Fatigue, Sleep Apnea, and Missouri Truck Accidents Go Hand and Hand
Studies indicate that persons with sleep apnea perform as poorly on driving performance tests as those who are legally intoxicated. Sleep apnea causes truck drivers to become extremely fatigued, a problem that the trucking industry acknowledges as causing a vast majority of serious tractor-trailer accidents. Fatigue has been the cause of numerous serious truck accidents in Missouri, including a recent fatal truck crash in southern Missouri near Herculaneum. A recent study of 1,391 commercial truck drivers found that 28% had sleep apnea, with more than one-third characterized as having "severe" sleep apnea.
Sleep apnea impedes upon a persons ability to get a good nights sleep. Truck drivers who don't get a good night sleep are a serious safety hazard to the general motoring public in Missouri. Truck drivers as a group have a wider percentage of drivers with sleep apnea that the general public since they are mostly overweight and have clinical hypertension. This is not a dig at truck drivers themselves, but the fact of the matter is that most truck drivers do not live healthy lives and suffer from ailments that the active population doesn't.
What our Missouri truck accident injury lawyers do on a daily basis in courtrooms across the country will shape what the commercial trucking industry does in the future. Negligent truck drivers and the companies that knowingly hire them, despite deficient health qualifications, must answer to the public when preventable truck accidents take place on our roadways. Accidents involving 80,000 pound trucks typically cause catastrophic injury and death to motorists in small passenger vehicles. More has to be done to weed out drivers with sleep apnea and fatigue problems, otherwise we will continue to lose loved ones in these preventable acts of negligence.