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Drive to disaster That's if you are drunk
Drunken driving
"During the past month, how many times have you driven when you've had perhaps too much to drink?"
This question has been part of a survey conducted periodically among about 100,000 Americans over the past decade. And over the years, people reported fewer and fewer occasions.
But a new study by researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that in recent years, the number of occasions has begun rising again. The report appears in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
The researchers, led by Dr. Kyran P. Quinlan, now at the University of Chicago, found that from 1997 to 1999, the number of times people reported driving after drinking too much increased by 37 per cent. Over the course of a year, the researchers calculated, that amounted to 159 million occasions — and those were just the ones people admitted.
In the early years of the survey, conducted by random calling across the country, the occasions of impaired driving decreased by about 1 per cent a year.
Among the more troubling findings, the researchers said, was that some of the riskiest alcohol users, binge drinkers, were the most likely to say they had driven while impaired. Those drinkers were 13 times as likely to report having done so as others.
In 2002, according to the study, alcohol-related crashes caused more than 17,000 deaths and more than 250,000 injuries.
The study found that while the level of drinking and driving varied by characteristics like age, sex and education, it had gone up in almost all groups.
The researchers recommended additional crackdowns. They suggested lowering the legal limits for blood-alcohol content, more quickly suspending the licences of those charged with driving while impaired, increasing sobriety checkpoints and using equipment that prevents cars from being started by people who have been drinking.
Setting the record straight
Did Pythagoras have epilepsy? How about Leonardo da Vinci? Or James Madison?
No, no and no, says a new study. For that matter, neither did Agatha Christie, Niccolo Paganini or William Pitt.
Yet they and many other famous people are often described as epileptic in books and lectures about the disease, according to the study, which appears in Epilepsy & Behavior and was written by Dr. John R. Hughes of the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical School.
"Many lecturers on epilepsy begin their talks with a slide that lists a large number of famous individuals who are said to have had epilepsy," Hughes wrote. "This information often shocks the audience and does get their attention."
Hughes, turning to the record, set out to see how many of the historical figures cited as epileptics did, in fact, seem to have the disease. For 43 of them, the evidence was insufficient to support the claim.
In a quarter of the cases, he reports, people described as having epilepsy really had psychological problems like anxiety. In other cases, the seizures that people described were probably caused by alcohol withdrawal. In some cases, as with Pythagoras, no mention of anything even resembling epilepsy was found.
Hughes said that apart from correcting the historical record, he also wanted his study to serve as a reminder that epilepsy continues to be misdiagnosed today.
(Courtesy: New York Times)
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