LAST month a Land Rover travelling on the M62 motorway veered off the road
and crashed onto a railway track close to the village of Great Heck, near
Selby, in Yorkshire. It derailed the 4.45 am express from Newcastle, which was
then hit by a speeding freight train. Ten people were killed. Initial suspicions
focused on the possibility that the driver of the Land Rover had fallen
asleep.
Driver fatigue is a major cause of road accidents in Britain. The Department
of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) holds statistics on 40,000
serious injuries and 3500 deaths on our roads. It estimates that drowsiness
causes at least 10 per cent of all road accidents, and as many as one in five on
motorways and trunk roads. It is a bigger killer on Britain鈥檚 roads than
alcohol.
Some 20 years ago I read about the work of Jim Horne, who runs a sleep
laboratory at the University of Loughborough
(快猫短视频, 12 November 1981, p 429).
We have corresponded ever since and he tells me how his
research is progressing. A good deal of it focuses on combating the problem of
sleepy drivers.
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Together with his colleague Louise Rayner, Horne has found that sleep-related
road accidents are very likely to result in death or serious injury because they
tend to occur at high speeds when the driver fails to brake. Most accidents
happen in the early hours and in mid-afternoon, when the body鈥檚 natural clock is
set at daily low points.
Whatever the trigger for the Selby tragedy turns out to be, drowsiness among
drivers is a killer that needs to be combated.
INSURANCE companies in Britain have a freer hand to use genetic tests to set
premiums than those in other countries, claimed researchers from the London
School of Economics in a recent report
(快猫短视频, 17 February, p18).
They went on to say that it left a 鈥渟trong potential for improper use鈥�.
That reminded me of the insurance scams outlined in John Hind鈥檚 letter to this
magazine (11 November 2000, p 60), which was published around the time that the
government鈥檚 Genetics and Insurance Committee decided to sanction predictive
genetic tests for Huntington鈥檚 disease in life-insurance underwriting. Hind
argued that insurance can only work effectively if both insurers and those
seeking insurance have access to the same information. He asserted that for
insurance to be an instrument of redistribution from the genetic rich to the
genetic poor, this sharing of information has to be made compulsory. I sent the
letter to junior social security minister Hugh Bayley for his comment.
Bayley replied that wholesale genetic testing would reveal that most people
carry genes that could result in disease鈥攐r might, should a partner have
the same abnormal gene, lead to their children having a disabling condition. In
the majority of the population these abnormal genes are not expressed and go
unnoticed. It can therefore be hard to tell from genetic information alone who
are the 鈥済enetic rich鈥� or the 鈥済enetic poor鈥�, Bayley said.
The minister added that if you know you have a personal or family history of
disease鈥攚hether inherited or acquired鈥攁nd deliberately fail to
disclose it to insurers, then your policy is void and payment will not be
made.
Readers wanting information on genetic testing and insurance should consult
www.medinfo.cam.ac.uk/phgu/info_database/Policy/industry.asp