Few could guess at the dangers lurking in the mundane corners of your home but one book will make you look at your garden hose in a new way
If you're prone to seeing the entire world through a lens of caution and fear, Laura Lee's book: 100 Most Dangerous Things in Everyday Life: And What You Can Do About Them might not be recommended bedtime reading.
But if you feel the need to measure the threat of terrorism against your chances of tripping over a garden hose, or drinking contaminated tap water, and to chuckle while doing so, Lee's book is worth a read.
From among hundreds of frightening facts uncovered in her extensive inspection of published health data, Lee found that every year in the United States, 12,779 people are injured by washing machines; an estimated 1,091 stair climbers are killed and 769,400 are injured and 3,038 people are injured by Christmas tree lights and 4,542 by non-electric decorations.
She says she's not trying to scare you, but Lee can't resist tossing in a number of fascinating freak calamities, such as a 1999 incident in which "two London women were killed by a massive bolt of lightning after the metal wiring in one of their bras acted as a conductor".
Her book has a "paradoxical purpose," Lee writes in her introduction. She seeks "not to increase the general paranoia but to diminish it. If you can look such deadly items as kitchen knives, bedding, vegetables and teddy bears in the face each day without fear, you should be able to stare down the much more statistically unlikely threats that now haunt our collective consciousness".
The handbook is also littered with tips that range from the obvious (don't run with a tuba) to the mundane (load the flatware in your dishwasher with the sharp parts down).
Lee pored over a mountain of medical journals, newspapers, magazines and other publications to research the handbook and the bibliography is crammed with titles including: "More electric wheelchair users involved in accidents," and "Laundryman dies in mishap with machine."
She likes the "idea of poking fun at the culture of fear and warning labels and pointing out that the things that you're least afraid of statistically are the most dangerous".
She documents examples of harm caused by teddy bears (choking hazard), dust (sometimes explodes), natural foods (toxins and carcinogens), music (violin-bow injury) and soda (exploding bottles), as well as more predictable causes, such as hospital stays (infections), candles (indoor pollution), cheerleading (stunts gone awry), and paper clips (getting stuck in one's ear).
The potential threats catalogued by Lee range from minor to deadly.
Some, such as eating mistletoe, are preventable; others, such as having the bad luck to be underneath a windowpane falling from a skyscraper, are accidents no one reasonably can anticipate and thus, avoid.
For that reason, Lee's advice ranges from the self-evident to the nonexistent. For example, there is very little one can do to avoid the dangers of being male, Lee discovered. A man's life expectancy is significantly lower than a woman's, and yet, all she can suggest, beyond returning to the Middle Ages when men lived longer, is "get a sex change operation".
Lee's list is not comprehensive; nor are all of her entries inherently dangerous. She selected her "dangerous things" with an emphasis on each one's entertainment quotient. "It's just factual information, told with humour," she says.
100 Most Dangerous Things in Everyday Life: And What You Can Do About Them, by Laura Lee (Broadway, $12.95) - (AP)