17 animals that kill us

The good news is that in the "civilized" world, man has practically defeated nature and animals do not pose any danger to him. The bad news is that in developing countries with high population density, where human settlements are adjacent to jungles, swamps and savannas, animals are still killing people, and there is no access to medicines, antidotes and antibiotics. Since most of the murders happen in remote corners of the planet, the statistics given are more or less approximate, there are no exact figures and, most likely, there will not be.

Sharks, and above all the great white shark, one of the modern symbols of absolute fear, attack people relatively rarely and kill about 10 people a year. Razor-sharp teeth, terrible speed, huge strength, and still - the bottom line of the rating.

The most terrible predator of a temperate climate, the main enemy of all fairy tales of European peoples, the wolf devours no more than ten people a year (because it lives mainly in nature reserves and avoids people).

In Northern India and in In Pakistan, elderly and not very healthy tigers still come to villages and eat people. Man-eating tigers are hunted, and this is a great progress, I must say: in Kipling's time, tigers killed up to a thousand people a year.

African lions are still attacking people in Kenya and Tanzania. Usually lions live in prides and avoid people. But lonely and not very healthy animals can pose a great danger to humans.

A small creature filled with a stun poison. A jellyfish burn causes convulsions and unbearable pain, and if it happens at a depth, the victim can easily drown.

Elephants are huge, strong, intelligent and very vindictive animals that can kill a person in an instant. And in India not only hunts elephants (small wild elephants make excellent working elephants), but also constantly reclaim land from the jungle, because there is never enough arable land. As a result, there is a sluggish human-elephant war, which humanity, of course, wins, but not without losses.

The buffalo weighs under a ton and runs very fast. In addition, buffaloes are well organized in case of danger, they become in a fighting order (weak and young in the middle, strong males and females - in a circular defense). And what exactly they consider a danger is known only to them.

Formally, hippos are herbivorous. In fact, they are one of the most dangerous animals in Africa. Huge weight, decent speed, terrible fangs and a highly developed territorial instinct. Don't mess with hippos!

All kinds of crocodiles are very dangerous — both Nile, and those that live in the swamps of Louisiana, and Amazonian. The deadliest species is saltwater crocodiles living off the northern coast of Australia and the southern coast of New Guinea. The exact number of victims is unknown: whenever crocodiles decide to eat surfers, it gets into the newspapers, but when they eat New Guinea fishermen, no one notices. A favorite maneuver is to grab a person with your jaws and turn over sharply, drowning the victim and breaking her back.

These creatures live in the digestive tract of humans and some animals. Under certain conditions, the larvae of flatworms enter the lungs and the disease cystocerciasis begins, which, in turn, leads to death.

Another intestinal parasite, the larvae of which can get into the lungs, brain, and heart. In addition, ascarids are happy to live in blood vessels and feed on red blood cells, as a result of which patients almost always develop anemia.

Strictly speaking, the killers are not snails, but the schistomosis that they spread. Parasitic flatworms trematodes penetrate the human body through the skin, enter the blood vessels and migrate either to the gastrointestinal tract or to the area of the bladder and genitals. But it is freshwater snails that carry the larvae of these worms. It turns out that these babies kill much more people than lions, elephants, crocodiles and hippos combined. There's nothing to say about sharks.

These bedbugs, living next door to a person in a slum, carry Chagas disease— an infectious parasitic disease common in Latin America. At the beginning of the 21st century, 11-18 million patients were registered. At the same time, Chagas is incurable, medications can only control the course of the disease and suppress the symptoms. So in fact, the statistics can be much darker.

Remember Jules Verne? The common African fly spreads sleeping sickness, African human trypanosomiasis. This is a very dangerous parasitic disease common in equatorial Africa, which is incredibly difficult and expensive to treat. However, there are some successes: now the mortality rate from trypanosomiasis is about 10,000 people, and in the early nineties it was more than 30,000.

Statistics are inexorable: our closest and oldest friends are deadly to us. Dogs quite often attack their owners, they can bite a child on a walk, and there is nothing to say about stray dogs that get together in packs. But still, the main danger is the rabies virus. If preventive measures are taken in time (the notorious injections in the stomach immediately after the bite), a person infected with rabies will survive. If the disease begins to develop, the mortality rate is 100%. However, rabies is a third-world disease: those who cannot see a doctor die. In developed countries, they are fighting the virus by total vaccination of dogs.

Venomous snakes are being killed all over the world. Not all poisons have antidotes, and not all people have access to these antidotes: in some regions, it's so far to go to the nearest outpatient clinic that the poison will kill sooner anyway.

Well-known bloodsuckers are the most terrible killers. Mosquitoes carry two diseases. First, malaria. 350-500 million cases of malaria are recorded annually, with at least a million of them ending in death. The second disease is Dengue fever, with a very high mortality rate (and absolutely terrible, with severe hemorrhagic form, without medical intervention).