Thread title was in the news yesterday in Japan: http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20140827p2g00m0dm059000c.html
Today, they did a piece on the news showing the top 5 animals that are responsible for human deaths around the world every year. Can you guess which animals made the top 5 without looking it up? I’ll post the cite tomorrow.
(Since the news is about dengue fever, you can safely assume mosquitos made the top 5.)
Mosquito, rats, dogs, snakes, and spiders.
WAG.
Nah, fleas have to be a big one as well. I would assume rat-carried diseases are transmitted via fleas, like the Black Plague.
Mosquitos, fleas, rats - pretty confident of those. Next are guesses - snakes? Hippos? Dogs? Deer? Hogs? No real clue.
I’m wonder if dogs and cats make the list if you consider animal-in-road-panic caused fatal car accidents. Maybe even deer, since there are a lot of them, and you usually see them at highway speed, and can kill ya if you hit them or swerve and lose it.
Depends what you call an animal, I reckon humans killing each other either directly or by the side effects caused by famine, or maybe even road incidents. and passing on infections such as flu to each other, the list might be endless, how about humans killing themselves too.
mosquitos, flies (leishmaniasis mainly), ticks, fleas, and I can’t guess a fifth.
Good guesses by all. I’m surprised many people mentioned rats. It never occurred to me that rats would cause human deaths through bites or disease, unless you’re thinking about the Bubonic plague. But even then, I thought it was the fleas living on the rats that were ultimately responsible for the disease.
Anyway, here is the answer:
This was the source that the news program mentioned. The answer contains a curveball by counting humans as an animal, but I guess that’s not wrong. It looks like they count only murders and not accidents or war, as cause of death.