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Daylight Savings Time Can Be Deadly?
Changing the clocks doesn’t change our internal biorhythms and may not be good for our health.
Daylight Savings Time was intended to be something beneficial for everyone in the United States, and each year, we have to adjust our clocks, but in doing so, we cannot adjust our internal clocks on which everything in our body depends; therein lies the problem. For that reason, there is a continuing outcry for both the elimination of Daylight Savings Time (DST) and an outcry indicating a wish for it to be permanent. Which is the better of the two alternatives? Perhaps we shouldn’t be adjusting the clocks at all because some statistics point to problems related to this change in time, and we cannot ignore that. What are the discerning reasons for either approach to DST?
One reason is how wildlife and cars interact during DST. The main cause of death for many animal species is a collision with a car. About 2.1 million car accidents involving deer happen in the US every year, resulting in more than $10 billion in damages, 59,000 injuries, and 440 deaths. One list of 1,012,465 deer-vehicle crashes (DVCs) indicated that this happened every hour in 23 US states from 1994 to 2021. It is 2.5 times more common than expected that almost 10% of DVCs happened in the two weeks around the fall clock change. But, despite the danger to wildlife and humans, there are other…
