Thursday, December 24 2009

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By INDARJIT SEURAJ...

IN A two-hour span, my limit would be five Carib beers. I am 32 years old, five feet, eleven inches and weigh 188 lbs. Each bottle of Carib beer contains 5.2 percent alcohol and measures 275 ml.

The website www.rupissed.com calculated my Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) at 0.073 percent. The newly implemented breathalyser testing in TT uses different measurements but the website has already listed TT as having a BAC limit of 0.08. This means if your BAC is over 0.08 and you are driving, you have some explaining to do to the police.

In fact, most countries have adopted this reading as their limit and reference to the website should, at the very least, give guidance on what your limit should be. Each person’s limit will vary according to body and the alcohol content of the drink consumed.

Knowing your limit is key to avoid being arrested and prosecuted and more importantly, being involved in a smash up.

The National Security Ministry’s breathalyser testing began on Tuesday night and an important tool for drivers would be knowing what is their limit. If a person consumes alcohol and intends to drive, they should have a relatively fair idea of the legal limit so they can know when to stop drinking.

Several websites offer free BAC calculators which give a close enough reading to what your limit should be. My BAC was 0.073 percent, just under the legal limit of 0.08. The percentage will decrease with a longer time span, estimated to decrease by 0.01 percent with every 40 minutes that elapses after the initial test.

It is also important to note that the readings on these websites also suggest that women’s BAC are usually higher even after consuming the same amount of alcohol. Using the calculator, the BAC for a 32-year-old female, five-feet, eleven inches and weighing 188 lbs, after drinking five Carib beers in two hours, was 0.081 percent — just above the legal BAC limit.


How the breathalyser test works

According to the website www.rupissed.com, “Alcohol that a person drinks shows up in the breath because it gets absorbed from the mouth, throat, stomach and intestines into the bloodstream. Alcohol is not digested upon absorption or chemically changed in the bloodstream. As the blood goes through the lungs, a physiologically predictable amount of the alcohol will move across the lung membranes and into the lungs themselves.

Once in contact with the air in the lungs, it evaporates and is exhaled. The concentration of the alcohol in the air in the lungs is directly related to the concentration of the alcohol in the blood.”

Using the breathalyser testing, the unit measures a person’s BAC and is expressed as the percentage of alcohol in deciliters of blood.

In the scenario proposed above, after two hours of drinking my BAC measured 0.073. By definition, a person whose BAC crosses 0.08 is deemed legally intoxicated. It also means that a person’s ability to manoeuvre a vehicle is impaired and that person is 11 times more likely to get into a vehicular accident than a sober person. So the key to it all is simply this: Know Your Limit.