Killing us sleepily.

Since I was misdiagnosed by a sleepy intern 45 years ago, I have taken a keen interest in reducing the number of hours worked by those poor souls. After years of effort by this columnist and many others, hospitals responded by imposing an 80-hour-per-week limit. This still seems way too long to me. And now we learn from the Sept. 6 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association that 43 percent of interns and first-year residents say they're working more than 80 hours a week. Two-thirds said they had exceeded 30 consecutive hours on duty.

Does their fatigue cost patients? Forty-four percent of the residents of the Mayo clinic admit to making at least one major error.