Imagine driving your children to school.  Or commuting along an interstate in rush-hour traffic.  Or rushing your wife to the delivery room for the imminent birth of your child.  Or any other scenario that puts you and your vehicle’s passengers on the road alongside a bus or tractor-trailer rig.  This happens to everybody every day.

Now imagine the driver of that enormous commercial vehicle is receiving medical disability benefits from the federal government and may, at any moment, suffer a heart attack, seizure, or other medical mishap that puts him or her unconscious while behind the wheel of that vehicle that weighs 40 tons or more and may be traveling in excess of 70 miles per hour.  Toward you.

This, too, happens every day and the end result is often deadly.  The Associated Press (AP) has just reported that a new US safety study says there are actually hundreds of thousands of drivers licensed to drive commercial vehicles although they are fully disabled according to federal standards and are receiving federal medical disability benefits.

Hundreds of highway deaths are attributed to bus and truck drivers blacking out, collapsing, or experiencing other types of major medical events that leave them incapacitated even though they are behind the wheel.  Years of government warnings have proven ineffective thus far.

We rely on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to keep unsafe and disabled commercial drivers off the road.  Since 2001, eight specific recommendations have been proposed but the federal safety administration has failed to implement each and every one of them thus far.  No one can say if any of them will be imposed before the current US president leaves office in January.

One recommendation asks for a minimum standard of health for the nation’s commercial drivers.  Another wants to prevent “doctor shopping,” a common practice in which medically unfit drivers seek physicians known to overlook risky medical conditions.

Speaking on behalf of the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, an industry watchdog group based in Washington, Gerald Donaldson, a senior research director for the organization, calls the situation a “major public safety problem” in dire need of correction.  The advocate group represents consumers, insurance companies, and other health and safety entities.

In the report reviewed by AP, 7.3 million traffic violations were issued to commercial drivers in 2006.  Of these millions of traffic violations, drivers in every state in the nation were cited for violation of federal medical rules.  More than half of all medical violations were issued in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

Source: AP