Is your appendix a greater threat than terrorism? Maybe not anymore.

I was doing some reading while bored this afternoon and came across one of my favorite quotes:

"In the past ten years, a period covering the largest terrorist attack on American soil, fewer people have been killed by terrorists than by their own appendix." -- Unknown

I realized I've never investigated it before. I think it's true going into it, so here's what I found out:

The Facts


Approximately 1.7% of people who get appendicitis die from it, according to literature available from the British Medical Journals. A WebMD article on acute appendicitis indicates that the incidence rate of appendicitis is 1.1 cases per 1000 people per year: for a United States population of 304 million, this amounts to 5684 deaths/year from your appendix. Ten years hence, and we're up to 56840 deaths due to appendicitis. Exclusively acute appendicitis: post-surgical complications kill another 1003 per year at 0.3% mortality for a total of additional deaths over that time period, for a grand total of 66870 people killed by their own appendix over the last decade.

According to extremely right-wing blog titled "The Religion of Peace" on their main page, there have been 14248 terrorist attacks since 9/11. We'll include 9/11, so that number raises to 14249. Over 10 years, that's 1425 attacks/year -- only one-quarter the incidence per year of an attack of appendicitis. I think it's okay to use slanted information to make the comparison. I imported the data into Excel and determined totals:

9/11 Attack: 2993
Post-9/11 to 2003: 3054
2004: 7210
2005: 7680
2006: 15269
2007: 20134
2008: 10773
2009 YTD: 5757

(*: This is only a portion of terrorist attacks that happened. I'm lazy, this was the first result. The figures are probably much higher when you include violence in SE Asia and Africa, but the lines for some of those attacks is a bit blurrier. We're understating the danger of terrorism, the same way we're maximizing the danger of appendicitis. )


Data before 9/11 also wasn't the top result for a lazy Bing query, so I'm not going to bother to include it here. But, even so, it looks impressive: a total of 72870 people have been killed by terrorists at a minimum. If we extrapolate using the base rate, 2001-2003, we have 3054 people per year for an additional 2 years bringing the total up to 78978 people killed by terrorists.

So that's 66870 people assassinated by their internal organs, and 78970 by terrorists. The incidence rate of terrorism is lower (1.75%) versus that of appendicitis (7%) per year but more people are killed by terrorists. Terrorist attacks frequently have around a 50% mortality rate, making terrorist attacks clearly more deadly if you are a victim, but much less likely. Unfortunately, the 2% mortality of appendicitis is far more than 4x the danger.

So, in conclusion, my favorite quote is wrong. But, based on the trend of the earlier figures, it's definitely possible the quote was true several years ago. I guess I'll not be quoting this one anymore. As far as what this all means....