You're scared of the wrong dangers

A long read

The things you fear may not be the things that hurt you

Some dangers make your heart race. But the scariest dangers are often not the deadliest ones. Your fear meter and the real numbers do not match.

Myth or fact?

Falling coconuts kill about 150 people a year, far more than sharks.Tap to reveal

You may have heard this. It is not true, and where it came from matters. A 1984 paper counted coconut injuries in one hospital in Papua New Guinea. It recorded two deaths. A travel insurance firm turned that into "150 a year worldwide" in a press release. The head of the International Shark Attack File then repeated it to reporters. He later admitted he had taken it from the press release as hyperbole. Nobody has ever counted. A module about wrong risk numbers should not open with one.

Sharks do kill about 10 people a year worldwide. That number is counted, by the International Shark Attack File. The coconut number never was.

Sources

Barss, "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts," Journal of Trauma, 1984 — the paper the "150 deaths a year" myth was built on, which reported two deaths in one hospital
CDC — falls are the leading cause of injury death at 65+, over 38,000 deaths in 2021; about 1 in 4 older adults falls each year
CDC, Provisional Mortality Data 2022 — heart disease 699,659; cancer 607,790; unintentional injuries 218,064
David Spiegelhalter, micromorts and microlives (plus.maths.org) — ~10 micromorts per parachute jump; ~250 car miles vs ~6 motorbike miles per micromort
Gigerenzer, "Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire" (2006) and Risk Savvy — about 1,595 additional US road deaths in the 12 months after 9/11

International Shark Attack File, Florida Museum (with National Safety Council and CDC data) — lifetime odds: car crash ~1 in 84, lightning ~1 in 79,746, shark ~1 in 4,332,817

Owen Shen, "Does the news reflect what we die from?" via Our World in Data — heart disease 29% of deaths and 2.8% of articles; cancer 27% and 4.1%; terrorism ~0.01% of deaths and about a third of coverage

Paul Slovic, "Perception of Risk," Science, 1987 — the dread and unknown factors

Tversky & Kahneman, "Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability," 1973

United States Parachute Association, "How Safe is Skydiving?" — USPA's own fatality table: 16 fatalities in 3.47 million jumps in 2025 = 0.46 per 100,000; 149 in 34.27 million across 2016–2025 = 0.43 per 100,000, i.e. about five micromorts per jump. https://uspa.org/discover/faqs/safety

US Department of Justice, NISMART — about 100–150 stereotypical kidnappings a year; family abductions in the hundreds of thousands

USAFacts — road deaths per 100 million vehicle miles against aviation deaths per 100 million passenger miles

Read end to end and corrected: August 9, 2026. Numbers checked: August 9, 2026.