Sky Palma is the founder of DeadState, and a senior editor at Raw Story.

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If I was to ask you what was the most

dangerous animal in the world, and you were to think tigers, bears or sharks,

you’d be wildly wrong, particularly with sharks. Despite Shark Week, despite Jaws,

sharks are not statistically dangerous to humans – quite the reverse, humans

kill millions, many, many millions of times more sharks that sharks kill humans.

I’m sure some smartass out there will be

thinking that the most dangerous animal is man, but I’m thinking of other

animals that kill humans.

A shark…

And by a mile, the

winner is the mosquito. To put it in context, sharks typically kill five or

six humans per year, worldwide. Depending on your sources, mosquitoes kill somewhere

between 700,000 and 2.7m

people per year. Get that, mosquitoes kill at the very least 100,000 times

more people than sharks. They are estimated to be responsible for about 17 per

cent of all the disease on the planet. I can’t wait for Mosquito Week on the Discovery Channel.

They kill, of course, by spreading diseases

when they bite, notably malaria, but also zika, dengue, and yellow fever, and

many others. If you live in a western country and get one of these diseases,

you will probably survive – probably – because you have access to good

healthcare, but millions of people around the world don’t, and die.

But there’s hope.

… or a mosquito. Which should you fear most?

A newly-developed

vaccine to malaria is now being deployed in Kenya, and hopefully soon to

other countries, and it is proving very effective. This is significant because

around the world,