Can you die from lack of sleep?!

Can you die from lack of sleep?

I've been thinking about this for sometime now, I've asked some people most of them say yes... But I figure I should ask a few thousand other people.

It seems as if death can and ultimately does occur from sleep deprivation, although the timescale for that is unknown.
The following is an account of how I came to that conclusion.

On a Science Channel documentary on sleep, they stated that you can only go 10 days without sleep. I tried to research and confirm this, and I found from an unverified source that a man who participated in a sleep study had kidney and liver damage, and that hallucinations occur after a 5 or more days without sleep. However I subsequently found that the Guinness Book of World Records recorded 11 days as the maximum achieved, but since then has removed the category due to health risks. The man who won the record recovered without incident.
In further research I then discovered that people with Morvan's Syndrome can go months without sleep, and a man in Vietnam claims to have gone 33 years without sleep with nearly no consequense following a mysterious fever as discribed in this news article: http://www.thanhniennews.com/features/?c...
Doctors have linked sleep deprivation with metabolic changes and causes hallucinations, paranoia, blurred vision, slurred speech and memory and concentration lapses.
It is also impossible to tell if someone is really awake without close medical supervision. People can take cat naps with their eyes open without even being aware of it.
This leads me to believe that the most reported cases of prolonged sleep deprivation are false.

As of yet I have found no reported cases of dieing from sleep deprivation in humans, however studies have shown that in rats, sleep deprivation increases food consumption and energy use, leading to weight loss and death after 10-20 days.