Nuclear accident at Three Mile Island
March 28, 1979
Gas Leak in Bhopal
Dec 3, 1984
Space Shuttle Challenger disaster
Jan 28, 1986
Chernobyl nuclear disaster
April 25, 1986
Exxon Valdez Oil Spill off Alaska
March 24, 1989
Grounding of cruise ship Star Princess in Alaska
June 22, 1995
Train wreck in Michigan
November 15, 2001

IT may sound strange but the missing link to all these disasters is sleep—or the lack of it. Most of these accidents occurred late at night, the men and women responsible for them were invariably overworked and sleep deprived.

If the list looks small, the reason is that sleep research dates back to a mere 30 years. And if the magnitude of the disasters leaves anything to be desired, add to it the thousands of fatalities that occur on roads, in hospitals and factories across the world because the driver or the doctor or the mechanic could not keep his or her eyes open any longer.

A 2005 poll in the US attributed 10,000 car accidents to sleep deprivation alone. And a September 2000 study done in Australia and New Zealand found that people who drove a car after being awake for around 19 hours, performed worse than people whose alcohol level in blood was 0.5 per cent.

‘‘It takes exactly 10 seconds for a sleep deprived person to fall deeply asleep. And in certain situations, if that sleep lasts even 10 seconds, it can do serious damage,’’ says Dr Sanjay Manchanda, who has studied the subject at St George’s Hospital in Sydney, Australia, and now heads the Sleep Clinic of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in New Delhi.

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