Unlikely Ways To Die

What are some uncommon ways of dying?

Some uncommon ways have to do with the names that the diseases were given. Some uncommon fatal diseases are named for what they do and others have no bearing on what happens. One is considered “geographic tongue”, which at first you may think it has to do with a certain geography of where you are, but it actually has to do with lesions that form on the tongue that look like the contours of a map seen in 3-D. So over 1,700 people die from this geographic tongue every year.

How many people have died from toothpicks?

Since nineteen-hundred over seventeen-thousand people have died from toothpicks. Actually more people die from toothpicks every year than lightening. And how this happens is that they ingest the toothpick. A toothpick is wood and it cannot be digested, and this causes a sepsis in the blood. One of the most famous incidents is the writer Sherwood Anderson, who was at a cocktail party eating some hors d'ourves, some small frankfurters with a toothpick in it, and during this course he not only swallowed the small hotdog but the toothpick as well. He died five days later from a form of sepsis, from the toothpick.