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Health Check: Can Warnings Help Texting Pedestrians Safely Cross Roads?

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Can Warnings Help Texting Pedestrians Safely Cross Roads?

2018/06/20 GMT

BBC World Service - Health Check, Can Warnings Help Texting Pedestrians Safely Cross Roads?

Mobile phone alerts that help prevent texting pedestrians from being hit by cars

Warnings to help texting pedestrians cross roads; The only North American clinic licensed to give medical-grade heroin; How long sleep may be especially harmful if you’re a woman

In the US alone last year more than 5000 pedestrians were killed on the roads and there were 70,000 pedestrian injuries involving motor vehicle collisions. Distraction – and texting in particular - has been identified as a key risk factor, with studies showing that cell phone use impairs pedestrian and driver attention. So Pooya Rahimian and researchers at the University of Iowa are trying to come up with warning systems on our cell phones that can help pedestrians cross safely. One such system uses the kind of technology that is used in driverless cars, which can detect and locate every car in the vicinity. It sends an audio cue to texting pedestrians if they are about to walk out in front of a car. The results of the experiment have just been published in the journal Human Factors.

Drug overdose deaths have seen a sharp rise over the last few years - particularly in North America and Europe - so much so that the problem is now frequently referred to as "the opioid crisis". Some countries have adopted an approach known as harm reduction; using safe injecting rooms and needle exchange programmes for heroin users to reduce the risk of transmission of HIV and other infections passed on through needles. 
But now, in the face of the threat posed by fentanyl, a vastly more potent synthetic opioid than morphine, which is often mixed with street drugs, advocates of the harm reduction approach say the time has come to go a step further and prescribe injections of medical grade heroin to addicts. 
A pioneer in this is the Providence Crosstown clinic in the Canadian city of Vancouver, Canada, which is the only clinic in North America licensed to prescribe medical grade heroin. The BBC’s Jatinder Sidhu reports.
 
Health Check has previously talked about the importance of sleep for our health. And how if you persistently don’t get enough sleep or if you do night shifts, the long term consequences for health are harmful, with an increased risk of heart disease, cancer and stroke. 
But a huge new study from South Korea, just published in BMC Public Health, has found that spending too long in bed might also be a problem, especially for women. Researchers looked at metabolic syndrome, which involves a combination of symptoms such as high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity. Claire Kim, the lead author, is a research scientist at the Seoul National University College of Medicine. 



(Photo: Using mobile phones while crossing the road. Credit; Getty Images)

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