Fun look at fatality statistics at the Statistical Assessment Service:
Falling TV Sets Kill More Kids Than Sharks (Yes, Really)Heh...
After heavy media coverage of the crash of Swissair Flight 111, public fears of being in a plane crash were exceeded only by the Federal Aviation Administration's demand that boarding passengers list their next of kin or other emergency contact. The actual risk numbers do not bear out these concerns. In fact, we often seem predisposed to fear the wrong things.
A plane crash makes the nightly national news, while another car crash seems so mundane as to barely elicit a mention on the local news. Yet our odds of dying in a plane crash (based on flying 100,000 miles per year on large commercial jets) are about 1 in 500,000, and those of us left on the ground have a 1 in 25 million chance that we will be killed by a plane falling on us. In 1994, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, there were only 723 air and space transport accident fatalities. On the other hand, there were 42,524 motor vehicle fatalities. Since far more of us drive than fly, should our drivers licenses denote next of kin?
Our fear of unlikely events can be found on many levels. For instance, pop culture products from Jaws to National Geographic specials have fed public fears of the Great White Shark. Such fears, however, are largely baseless.
Nature magazine recently reported that the number of people killed by these fearsome predators totals only 7 individuals in this century. Yet between 1990 and 1997, according to the journal Pediatrics, four times that number of children were killed by TV sets falling on them. That is, watching Jaws on TV is more dangerous than swimming in the Pacific.
