BANGALORE: Thirty ml of alcohol on a weekend evening may cause bigger health hazards than you think.If you are driving after 9 pm on any major road, you are bound to hit a police barricade where policemen and their corroborators jump right in front of your car bonnet frantically waving their hands to stop you.Next comes the most unhealthy part of police checking, a policemen will barge through the car window and come very close to your mouth to anticipate the quantity of drink that has gone down your throat, not to mention a trillions of bacteria that straightway go down your system. Slightest smell of alcohol will provocate them to pull out their breath analyser device. You are then forced to blow through a straw, which has already been used by a hundred other people and another billion germs migrate to your mouth.Though the city police are using state-of-the-art alcometers or breath analysers which are accepted worldwide to measure the level of alcohol in blood, many complain that the straws through which the driver has to blow are not replaced for the next use and the same straw is used to determine the blood alcohol concentration (BAC).According to the city traffic police, the legal permissible limit is 40 mg of alcohol per 100 ml of blood and if caught driving under the influence of liquor beyond this permissible limit, one is liable to be charged with the offence of drunken driving.Dr Vishwanath Bellad, pulmonologist at BGS Global Hospital, said that those who have respiratory tract infection face problems when they inhale through the straw. However, if the straw is totally dried, the chances of infection are less.Suggesting the enforcement, Dr Bellad added that it should be ensured that the straw used to check alcohol content should be disposed of immediately and a new straw should be used on every new check.Dr Srigiri Revadi, pulmonologist at Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Chest Diseases (RGICD), echoes the same. “It is unhygienic to use the same straw. It is also unhygienic if the police officials come near the face to ask for the name”, he added.New devicesHowever, the Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic and Security), Dr M A Saleem, refuted the allegations. “It is wrong that the police are using the same straw to check the alcohol consumption level of vehicle users. All traffic policemen have been trained and strictly directed to use new straws whenever they want to check a person,” he maintained.But when asked about the policemen coming near the mouth of a person to check whether he is drunk, Saleem said that it is a bit difficult to test each and every policeman using alcometer. However, he said that recently a new small machine has been introduced to avoid such things. “With the use of such devices, the police can keep themselves away from the persons who are being examined. The machine straight away gives signal to the police whether the person is drunk or not. After that, they will be examined using alcometer,” said Saleem.As of now, such machines have been given only to Indiranagar traffic police station and there are plans to provide it to all traffic police stations, he added.
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