Addressing a meeting of health professionals on Monday, Prof Charles Czeisler of Boston's Harvard Medical School compared the dangers of fatigue to drink driving.
"Being awake for 24 hours induces an impairment equivalent to a blood alcohol level of 0.10 per cent," Prof Czeisler said at Sydney's Royal Prince Alfred Hospital on Monday.
"Furthermore, getting only five hours' sleep each night for a week creates an impairment equal to 24 hours without sleep."
Prof Czeisler has led a team of US researchers looking at the results of sleep deprivation.
The research involved monitoring 2,700 medical interns across the US as they each worked a variety of day and night shifts of different lengths of up to 30 hours.
"The interns were monitored for 72 consecutive hours before, during and after their shifts during which we were able to detect times of slow-rolling eye movements when attention and memory consolidation were at the poorest," Prof Czeisler said.
"This is the zone of critical vulnerability."
Prof Czeisler recounted reports of interns falling asleep on their feet, one mid-way through surgery while holding a retractor and ripping out a patient's spleen as he fell to the floor.
"We are an increasingly drowsy nation, as I think is Australia," Prof Czeisler said.
"People are getting chronically insufficient sleep ... Not everyone is a goody-two-shoes and goes to bed at 10pm in the evening.
"Be it work or play, even staying up all night on internet chat sites ... I hear of people who work for 10 hours a day only to get home and chat online for another four hours."
Prof Czeisler said truck drivers and other transport workers were particularly prone to sleep deprivation.
"The need for sleep increases with every hour that we are awake," he said.
"Even if you are awake and you don't have a lapse in attention, if you're sleep deprived, it will still take you three times as long to put your foot on the brake when you see the child run out in front of your car."
