A healthy life
Posted on | September 1, 2010 | No Comments
One is increasingly wary about accepting all the health related advice that pours unendingly out of the various media. A glass of red wine will keep your arteries from clogging up, but give you a greater chance of contracting prostate cancer.
White wine promotes brain function, but will give you liver disease.
A protein-rich diet will give you gallstones, but blueberries will prevent heart disease. Butter is bad for you. I just give up and eat what is put in front of me, thinking of vegetarian teetotallers who have met an untimely end.
Just occasionally, you read of a health revelation which could be significant. For a long time, as long as the issue of fatigue has been debated in a marine context, people have wondered about whether fatigue, and extended periods of sleep deprivation, could have long-term health consequences.
We have read about the symptoms of fatigue, and the fact that it takes a lot more than one night’s sleep to restore one’s mental functions after a tour of duty on a ship where the master and mate work watch and watch in an intensive ship operation.
“Having to be gradually reintroduced to society” was a description by a shipmaster’s wife after her zombie-like spouse came home after his tour, and how she nursed him back to normality.
The officers’ union Nautilus, which clearly reads widely, draws attention to a study in the academic journal Sleep, which publishes details of an extensive study by the Department of Community Medicine in which the sleeping habits and the health of more than 30,000 adults were surveyed.
Cardiovascular disease of all kinds was twice as likely to occur among people who slept for fewer than seven hours per night, compared to those who slept for more than this number of hours. And if you slept for fewer than five hours per night the risk of heart disease was doubled.
These are still early days, but just suppose the link is made between sleep deprivation and a shorter life. The implications for an industry, significant bits of which still try and defend the indefensible regime of watchkeeping in lean-manned, intensively run ships surely cannot be avoided?
Isn’t it time we got beyond the arguments about costs, and even the dangers of ships with exhausted watchkeepers running aground or bumping into each other? It is worth looking back to those early fears that were expressed about the risks of exposure to asbestos, and remember how this ultimately developed. There may be more to hours of rest than a mere time-sheet.
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