Death By The Numbers

摘要

Heart disease and cancer claim the most lives, but at least doctors can spot them early on. Lightning? Not so much. Now, with the first county-level natural-disaster fatality map, you'll know which of Mother Nature's catastrophes to worry about in your neighborhood.rnSusan Cutter, director of the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of SouthrnCarolina, and geographer Kevin Borden, produced the map from reports of roughly 20,000 deaths from 1970 to 2004. "We were surprised by the prominence of everyday hazards," Cutter says, noting that major natural disasters don't actually account for that many deaths (although that might shift upward, she says, as they add hurricane-heavy data from 2005 to 2008). Heat and drought accounted for the most deathsrn(19.6 percent). Next were severe summer storms (strong winds and rain; 18.8 percent) and winter weather (18.1 percent).