I nominate President of the United States. Out of 45 Presidents so far ( remember Grover Cleveland was both 22nd and 24th), 4 were assassinated in office. This means it has fatality rate of 8.9%. I decided to exclude the 4 others who died of other causes while in office since their death was not related to their profession. Likewise. I discount Supreme Court Justices or other federal judges who are appointed for life and typically die in Office rather than retiring or resigning ( obviously some exceptions), since their death is not related to their job.
Is there any job with a higher fatality rate than this? If you want to include all deaths on the job, that’s fine, but be sure to qualify it. In this case, the U.S. president would rise to 17.8%.
Statisticians would probably say the sample is too small to be meaningful, also you would have to compare death rates in professions over the last 250 years.
Another way to look at it would be number of deaths per worked year. In this case, for President it is still 4 deaths but now out of approximately 240 years of someone doing that job. So 236 of those years no one died doing that job.
If 10 loggers per year died, but there are 1000 loggers employed each year and have been for 300 years, then U…S. President still scores more lethal.
I am not opposed to defining the job very specifically. What about U. S. Astronauts. I think there have been 17 deaths IIIRC ( 7 each for Challenger and Columbia and 3 for Apollo 1). But I dont know how many total astronauts there have been.
Several sources I find with a moment’s googling all agree that logging is the profession with the highest fatality rate in the U.S.; this site says that, in 2020, logging workers suffered 97.6 deaths per 100,000 workers.
As @Mk_VII noted, the sample size is way, way too small (1 or 2 people per year, depending on the year, and a total sample size, over 232 years, of less than 50) to be able to make that calculation in a meaningful way.
Some of those deaths might have been related to the profession; or, more precisely, where the profession required you to live. (Basically, there was a problem with contaminated drinking water in the White House)
There’s something very unusual that I noticed in that list. For most of these professions, the “most common fatal accidents” are listed as occupational hazards that seem appropriate: “falls, slips, trips, contact with equipment”, and the like. However, for the jobs “Small Engine Mechanics” and “Supervisors of Mechanics”, the most common fatal accident is described as: “violence and other injuries by persons or animals”. The only other occupation where this is listed is “Police Officers.”
Are small engine mechanics and supervisors of mechanics truly more at risk of deliberate violence than these other occupations? Is that number coming from proprietors of shops (who fall under those job categories technically, but are also running a business) being killed during robberies?
In the medical field, surgery is regarded as a relatively dangerous specialty, largely due to exposure to bodily fluids while wielding sharp instruments. Pathologists incur that risk as well, plus the added hazard of exposure to surgeons.
Any job that requires wearing a red Starfleet uniform must be regarded as posing an especially high risk of death.
Yeah, you can define jobs down to find some really dangerous sub-specialties. For example, airline pilots are much less likely to die on the job than commuter pilots, who in turn are less likely to die on the job than a bush pilot.
There are some very dangerous jobs out there that aren’t going to be listed because there aren’t enough people doing it. Stunt pilot for movies, for example.
What about soldier? Sure the death rate is low any given year, but during times of war the numbers are huge. Look at the 8th Air Force in WWII. They lost more personnel alone than the Marines did (I’m pretty sure that’s correct,)
I’m thinking that even averaged out over the years soldier had got to be up there.
I was thinking deep sea fishermen (e.g. “Deadliest Catch”) had a lot of risk.
There are approximately 115,000 commercial fish harvesters in the country. They operate a variety of equipment and vessels. In the years from 2000 through 2015, there was an average of 42 deaths a year, a total of 725 fishermen, which works out to about 117 deaths per 100,000 workers. The average among all U.S. workers is just four per 100,000.