New study says dozens of people have died while attempting dangerous selfies

A new study published by the National Institute of Health confirms what most of us already knew: taking dangerous selfies is dumb and has killed dozens of people over the past few years.

The study, titled "Selfies: A boon or bane?," concluded that 259 people across the world died between 2011 and 2017 due to incidents that occurred while taking selfies, with drowning (32 incidents killing 70 people) and falling (41 incidents killing 48 people) being the top reasons.

A few other take-aways from the study:

• Three times as many men as women died from taking selfies, often because of "risky behavior."

• An overwhelming number of deaths (182) occurred for ages 10 to 29.

• India accounted for over half of the deaths attributed to selfies during that time (159) followed by Russia (16) and the United States (14).

And, the study notes, the number given here is probably low because selfie deaths are underreported and often attributed to other causes.

None of this is a surprise to people who read the internet enough to come across headlines about multiple people dying in a single selfie incident or more people being killed taking selfies than being killed by sharks.

And the NIH used news reports to compile the totals the study could confirm. From the methodology:

Initially, we made an exhaustive list of the English newspapers of various countries using Wikipedia or Ministry of broadcasting of respective countries. We performed a Google search for keywords such as “selfie deaths; selfie accidents; selfie mortality; self photography deaths; koolfie deaths; mobile death/accidents.” The web link addresses of the news from search results were cross-matched with the web links of list of prepared English newspapers of various countries. The results that did not match were excluded from the study.

So it's a thorough search, but still likely leaves a lot of incidents out.

The study suggests the creation of "no selfie zones" at high-traffic tourist areas, "especially places such as water bodies, mountain peaks, and over tall buildings" which, actually, makes sense. Many of these already exist, but there's always room for more if the goal is to curtail these types of incidents.

For example, there are popular selfie destinations along the rim of the Grand Canyon where there are no rails or other means of preventing someone from walking right up to the edge and pitching over.

While instituting no selfie zones might seem like a bit of an over-reaction, it seems that people can't be trusted to look after themselves, so someone has to do it for them until they wise up.