With all this talk about love, gifts, roses, chocolate and significant others, should I really put up an article about the odds of how we're going to die? Why not? I find it interesting. I don't want to dwell on it, but it's information that we can use to better ourselves.
By Michael Bolen - Daily Brew (Yahoo News Blog(
While everybody dies, the manner of passing is usually a mystery until it happens.
But a new report can give you a picture of the most likely ways to go. The National Safety Council, which works to prevent workplace injuries in the U.S., has released its annual fact sheet listing the most common ways to die in America.
At the top of the list are some of the more predictable medical causes, such as heart disease (1 in 6 chance), cancer (1 in 7) and stroke (1 in 28). Below these medical causes are motor-vehicle accidents (1 in 85), intentional self-harm (1 in 115), accidental poisoning (1 in 139) and falls (1 in 184).
Other relatively common causes include accidental drowning (1 in 1073), exposure to smoke and fire (1 in 1,235) and (common for the U.S.) assault by firearm (1 in 300).
Some of the more unusual causes near the bottom of the list are cataclysmic storm (1 in 51,199), contact with hornets, wasps or bees (1 in 62,959), lightning (1 in 81,701) and being bitten or struck by a dog (1 in 119,998). At the very bottom of the list? Death by earthquake (1 in 153,597).
According to Statistics Canada's latest report on the subject, nine of the top 10 leading causes of death were identical in Canada and the United States in 2007. There were some interesting differences though. Heart disease and cancer were the top two causes in both nations, but while cancer topped the list in Canada, heart disease was number one in the U.S. Cancer accounted for 30 per cent of deaths in Canada compared with 23 per cent in the U.S.
Homicide was the second-most common cause of death for young adults in the U.S. compared to third-most common in Canada. However, StatsCan figures put the number of reported homicides in Canada at 594 compared to 18,361 in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (both stats for 2007). So adjusted for population, the U.S. still had roughly three times the number of homicides.