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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

"humans by the way are second behind the mosquito, causing 475,000 deaths every year..."

Depending on your background, you are either amazed that we are the second-biggest threat to ourselves because it's so self-destructive, or because you were convinced we had to be our own worst enemy.

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"Each year, 1.35 million people are killed on roadways around the world."

https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...

Seems to me that traffic deaths are "caused by" humans... not totally surprised they have decided those don't count, but I feel that that's wrong.

Well... cars are the dominant species on the planet so it makes sense not to count them as human caused deaths.

s/on the planet/in the US/

US is 6th, so not far off, but fewer cars per person than the rampant car culture of ... Iceland and New Zealand?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...

Even in Europe, cars are quite common for everyone. Maybe less for the middle class in big cities, but the traffic in London and Paris is quite terrible.

The US is a pretty disparate place. Here you go:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_vehicle...

If you compare to Iceland and New Zealand, you have to compare with rural US states. But still, not as bad as I thought TBH.

In many of those countries there are so many cars because they’re needed during peak tourist season

And guess where those tourists are from

Probably excluded because they're deemed unintentional. Of course the mosquitoes don't kill us intentionally either.

If mosquitoes are being credited with all the deaths by illness that they cause, it seems fair to credit humans for unintentional deaths also.

By that logic pretty much every accidental death that's a result of the modern world would be "caused by humans". House fires, heavy equipment mishaps, cancer from exposure to exotic man-made substances, overdoses, icy staircases, it's a long, long list.

Seems to me that adding all that crap in would make the category so broad as to defeat the point of categorizing. IDK if that was your point or if you just wanted your pet issue in the category.

We have many ways to lower car accidents and deaths in a country like the US. No effort is given to public transportation. Not counting them wouldn’t make sense unless enough effort was put in to lower those numbers. An accidental house fire isn’t the same thing at all. There weren’t major decisions made to purposefully allow sprawl and lack of funding into something that lowers house fires.

... old age.

Interesting case, but some of these are more like suicides (intentional or otherwise), and I think we were talking about one organism killing another. But still, you're correct, some significant portion of these must be one human killed by the actions of another.

Suicide accounts for just north of 800k human deaths each year. Definitely more than mosquitos.

The source is a "worlds deadliest [to humans] animals" infographic [0], and suicide seems to me like a very clear-cut case of a human killing a human. I don't know why it's excluded, and neither the article nor source explain.

[0]: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Most-Lethal-Animal-Mosquit...

It's not really clear-cut that it's relevant here, since we're talking about deaths which require at least two organisms (here, a mosquito and a human). The analogy would extend to deaths between humans where at least two are required which I think is a neater category to reason about when we think 'threat'. Suicide isn't the same kind of threat the same way another human is. You don't walk down the street ever fearing suicide will be imposed upon you, whereas you may well walk down the street fearing mosquito bites and other people.

It's pretty clear if we ask, what is the proximate cause for most deaths of people. It's the self.

Well someone else mentioned a higher yearly number for car accidents.

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