10 Ways to Make Your Fleet Safer
3 Sep 2019Managing a fleet is challenging work, particularly when you have vehicles spread throughout your city and state. There’s moving vehicles, heavy equipment and dangerous chemicals. These are only a few of the possibly dangerous things drivers and fleet staff encounter each day at work. Because of threats like these, it’s important you uphold safety policies for creating a safe and healthy workplace. Below are 10 ways to make your fleet safer.
- Make Safety a Priority
Fleet operations must make safety a priority to keep it on the minds of staff and drivers. Your fleet staff should know their well-being and safety is important to your company. Safety policies and information should be accessible to everyone. Keep First Aid kits nearby and safety data sheets for chemicals visible.
Drivers should take precautions too. They need to follow all traffic laws as well as rules you enforce such as:
- Sudden braking
- Aggressive driving
- Quick acceleration
You can use telematics to track the behaviors of your drivers and ensure they’re following safety rules.
According to the Oregon Department of Transportation, the safer drivers are those who take driver’s education classes. A study in 2018 from the Oregon DMV found 91 percent (9 out of 10) teen driver crashes were teen drivers who hadn’t taken driver’s education classes in order to receive their license.
David House, Oregon DMV’s spokesman stated, there is better driving behavior, fewer citations and fewer crashes among teenage drivers who take drivers ed and it lasts throughout their adulthood.
The study showed that drivers between the ages 15 to 20 years old that received driver’s education only made up 9 percent of crashes during that span in that age group.
A 2017 preliminary report in Oregon showed 44 drivers between the ages 15 to 20 years old killed 51 people. And, according to the state, that would indicate 40 or 41 of those drivers didn’t take a driver’s education course, considering the statistics and data.
New Blood Test for Alzheimers Has 94% Accuracy
27 Aug 2019A newer blood test for detecting brain changes indicative of early Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is becoming more realistic and could change everything for the field.
Researchers of a study published in Neurology, found that assessing the β-amyloid (Aβ) 42 and Aβ40 ratio in blood with the use of a high-accuracy evaluation is 94 percent accurate in brain amyloidosis diagnosis, using the reference standards CSF phosphorylated (p-tau) 181/Aβ42 or amyloid PET.
According to senior investigator and St. Louis’s Washington University School of Medicine’s professor of neurology, Randall J. Bateman, MD, at the moment, individuals are screened for clinical trials with expensive and time-consuming brain scans and it takes years to enroll people.
He added, that with a blood test, each month they could possibly screen thousands of individuals, meaning they could enroll individuals in clinical trials more efficiently, helping them find treatments quicker. And that could have a huge affect on the expense of AD and the suffering it causes to individuals.
Simple Screening Tool
Using a liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry and immunoprecipitation evaluation, the researchers assessed CSF samples and Aβ42/Aβ40 in plasma they gathered inside the 18 months of an amyloid PET scan from 158 older individuals mostly cognitively normal.
The combination of apolipoprotein (APOE) ε4 status, age and Aβ42/Aβ40 had “extremely high” (AUC, 0.94; 95% CI, 0.90 – 0.97) association with amyloid PET. This suggested the plasma Aβ42/Aβ40 could serve as a tool to screen individuals who have a higher chance of AD dementia, according to the researchers.
Also, those with negative amyloid PET scan, but a positive plasma Aβ42/Aβ40 have a 15-fold greater chance of changing to amyloid PET-positive (P = .01).
