Sick truckers causing fatal wrecks

Deadly Tolls: Sick truckers causing fatal wrecks

HOPE YEN and FRANK BASS

July 21, 2008 10:04 AM EST
WASHINGTON — Hundreds of thousands of tractor-trailer and bus drivers in the United States carry commercial driver's licenses despite also qualifying for full federal disability payments, and some of those drivers have suffered seizures, heart attacks or unconscious spells, according to a new U.S. safety study obtained by The Associated Press.

The problems threatening highway travelers persist despite years of government warnings and hundreds of deaths and injuries blamed on commercial truck and bus drivers who blacked out, collapsed or suffered major health problems behind the wheels of vehicles that can weigh 40 tons or more.

The U.S. agency responsible for cracking down on unfit truckers, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, acknowledges it hasn't completed any of eight recommendations that U.S. safety regulators have proposed since 2001. One would set minimum standards for officials who determine whether truckers are medically safe to drive. Another would prevent truckers from "doctor shopping" to find a physician who might overlook a risky health condition. It's unclear whether any of the eight recommendations will be done before President Bush leaves office.

"We have a major public safety problem, and we haven't corrected it," said Gerald Donaldson, senior research director at the Washington-based Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, whose members include consumer, health and safety groups and insurance companies. "You have an agency that is favorably disposed to maintaining the integrity of the industry's economic situation."

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Coping when loved ones have dangerous jobs

• Coping when loved ones have dangerous jobs
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(LifeWire) -- RoseEllen Dowdell wakes up in the middle of the night, thinking about her sons, one in the military and one a firefighter. Kristina Zimmerman changes the channel when she hears of another soldier killed -- not wanting to worry about her husband, a military policeman.

For them, and for other families of firefighters, soldiers, police officers, miners or anyone else who risks death to do their jobs, anxiety is a part of life.

"It is a constant state of worry and this feeling like your stomach is in your throat," says Zimmerman, 23, a stay-at-home mother of three whose husband, Michael, searches for drugs and bombs with an Army K-9 unit. The military will be sending him to Kosovo for a year in early 2008.

"I get frustrated because, yes, I know he is just doing his job and that he is doing it for us," says Zimmerman, who lives in Miesau, Germany -- where her husband is stationed. "But at the same time I don't understand how he can put himself at risk, and our kids and me at risk of losing him as a father and husband."

Dowdell, 51, who lives in the New York City borough of Queens, knows that kind of risk intimately. Her husband, Kevin, a 20-year veteran New York City firefighter and a member of an elite rescue unit, died in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Dowdell and her sons waited many anxious months for Kevin's body to be recovered
It was not until April 2002, when the majority of debris had been cleared from ground zero, that the Dowdell family was able to hold a memorial service and experience some kind of closure. Kevin Dowdell's body was never found.

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http://www.cnn.com/2007/LIVING/personal/11/27/uncertainty/