Index
Every public page on the Ledger. Thirty-one articles by their card headings, then the reference pages, then the rest of the site.
The dashboard is a visualisation. The articles explain it. The methodology is the arithmetic, and the glossary is the atlas vocabulary.
Reading the numbers
Eight pieces on how mortality statistics get misread.
Why 1.95 deaths per second?
Where the global death rate comes from, and why the right answer moved by twenty per cent between 2019 and 2021.
What actually kills people
Cardiovascular disease leads the table. The interest is what has been climbing underneath it.
How rare is a rare death?
Registers, estimates, the coconut myth and spontaneous human combustion, sorted one card at a time.
Why Germany looks deadlier than Kenya
Germany's crude death rate is higher than Kenya's. Germans are not in more danger.
What life expectancy actually measures
The most quoted number in demography is not a forecast for anyone alive today.
The number that says the most about a country
Infant mortality: why the rate reveals so much, how far it has fallen, and where it has not.
Where the deaths fall
The age bars are shares of deaths, not a ranking of danger. About half fall after seventy.
Countries with no card
The atlas lists every country in the WHO file for 2023. These are the ones it does not, and why.
Where the count comes from
Four pieces on how a count of the dead came to exist, who publishes the file, and what disease and war do to the record.
The bills of mortality
London was already listing its dead every week. In 1662 someone read the list as a series.
Not a register
The file behind the atlas is a modelled WHO estimate. It is not a live list, and it is not an American one.
Three kinds of paper
The Black Death, the 1918 flu, and COVID each broke the count, and left different records.
A year the rate cannot describe
The counters are a peacetime year. A big war is a different kind of year, and it burns the offices that would have recorded it.
Behind the Pathological Toll
One story for each counter in that column. The kicker stays, so the story can be found from the dashboard.
Cardiovascular Demise
Eighteen days
The first human heart transplant lasted eighteen days. The counter above it is heart attacks and strokes.
Neoplasm Malignancy
Several diseases, one slot
Lung, bowel, breast and the rest share one ticking number.
Infectious Pathogens
The one that ended
Smallpox is the only human disease ever declared gone. The infections on this counter are not.
Respiratory Failure
Five days of coal smoke
London, England, in December 1952, and the slow lung disease the counter actually counts.
Neurological Decay
She was fifty-one
Auguste Deter was not old. The dementia counter was named for her.
Metabolic Collapse
The first dose failed
Leonard Thompson's first injection abscessed. The counter is the diabetes that remained.
Behind Accidental Dooms
One story for each counter in that column.
Road Traffic Carnage
Four miles an hour
Bridget Driscoll, at the Crystal Palace in London, England, in 1896. The driver said he was doing 4 miles an hour.
Lethal Falls
Fifty-seven metres
Franz Reichelt jumped from the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France. The counter is mostly people over 60.
Drowning Abysses
Fourteen hundred and ninety
The Titanic inquiry's dead are not quite two days of this counter.
Fire & Inferno Burns
The doors were locked
The Triangle fire, in New York City, killed 146 people. That is about eleven hours of the burns counter.
Poisonous Toxins
The wrong cask
Arsenic sold as a harmless powder in Bradford, England, in 1858. The counter is accidental poisoning, not suicide.
Fatal Electrocution
Noon at Chambers Street
A lineman killed on a telegraph wire in New York City, in 1889. The famous electrocution was a punishment.
The unlisted toll
Lines the first two columns leave out. Four tick. The others are explained and do not.
Rare cards with their own story
The column is sorted in How rare is a rare death? These six are the replacements.
Scorpion Sting Deaths
Under fifty
A world estimate of about 3,000 scorpion-sting deaths a year, and Mexico's antivenom drop.
Snow Avalanche Deaths
A hundred in the Alps
About 100 deaths a year in the Alps. The world figure of about 250 is an estimate.
Commercial Aircraft, Onboard
People on board
A five-year mean of about 200. The second line is 394 onboard deaths in 2025.
Bee, Wasp and Hornet Stings
Coded X23
788 certified deaths in the United States from 2011 to 2021.
Civilian Skydiving Deaths
Nine, then sixteen
Nine civilian deaths in the United States in 2024, sixteen in 2025.
Pufferfish Poisoning, Japan
The liver, at home
Japan's series: zero or one death a year. 2025 recorded none.
Reference
How the Ledger counts
Every number on this site is a projection from an annual rate. None of them is an observation.
Glossary
The terms on the Atlas of Lethal Claims that are doing more work than they look.
The site
The Ledger
The dashboard: the counters, the atlas, and the graveyard.
Reading the numbers
The curated list of the articles, with the longer descriptions.
About The Demise Ledger
Where the statistics end and the theatre begins.
Contact
Corrections to the figures are the most useful thing you can send.
Privacy Policy
What the site records, the cookies it does not set itself, and the advertising script under review.
Terms of Use
Plain terms for a site that shows modelled statistics and asks nothing of you in return.