Morts Musings

Can you sleep safely in your Bed?

by Mort on Jun.12, 2009, under Weird stuff

It’s something that I touched on briefly in my post, Strange Bed Fellows, last week, but the stats on bed related deaths, which I found while researching that piece, were just so odd that I thought the subject deserved another mention.

If you’ll remember I managed to dig up some stats on the number of deaths in 2003, involving falls & beds, broken down by country. The stats don’t actually make it clear which deaths are due to people falling out of bed, and which were caused by falls on to beds, or even by being crushed under a falling bed, but the figures are apparently based on actually death certificate entries which recorded that a bed, and falling, were, somehow, involved in the deceased’s demise. They make stark reading!

I mean really who would have thought that something so common, & (usually) comfortable could be so dangerous! I’m surprised the Daily Mail hasn’t picked up on this insidious menace to society & started some kind of campaign to pressure the Govt into banning beds, or at least producing stricter laws about their production and use.

Afterall, according to the stats, Beds killed more people in the UK in 2003 than cannabis, a substance which is apparently dangerous enough to warrant being (re)classified as a “Class B” drug*. So, shouldn’t there be stricter warnings on the dangers of beds?
Having said that we in the UK can sleep relatively safely in our beds, coming, as we do, 42nd in the list of 46 countries for which per capita data is given. The UK only have 0.083 deaths per million people, which, in the grand scheme, amounts to a few really unlucky sods each year.

Bed Jumping:

Bed Jumping: It might look like fun, but it could end in tears, or worse...

If anybody deserves pity it’s the Hungarians, the nation to come out top of the per capita listing. In 2003 they had a staggering 14.39 bed related deaths per million people! While Finland comes in, in second place, with 9.19 deaths per million. Still a startling figure but, well, I can imagine that up there in the frozen north things might be more icey, making trips and falls more likely overall. Not to mention the fact that the country lives mostly in darkness during the winter months, that has to make the chances of having accidents, in general, more likely.


But, really, what is up with those Hungarian beds??? Are the Hungarians a particularly accident prone nation? Is there a national tendancy for bedroom acrobatics? Or are their beds construsted in such a way as to make them more lethal than the warm, comfortable, beds which we Brits might pick up from one of our department stores?


I honestly don’t know the answers to those questions, but it is one of those odd little things that makes one wonder, or at least it does me. God bless bizarre statistics! *shrug*


*A report prepared, last year, by the The Global Cannabis Commission for this year’s UN drug policy review attributed two reported deaths, ever, worldwide, to Cannabis use (I presume this figure relates to deaths attributed soley to cannabis.)

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3 Comments for this entry

  • Free PS3
    November 27th, 2009 on 3:38 pm

    Cheers for the informative info – I enjoyed reading it! I always enjoy reading your blog. :)

  • Isac Mathez
    December 16th, 2009 on 12:48 am

    I do wish there were more people like you around on the interwebs. Not many people are careful with their words, including myself sometimes. I have written things I would love to take back but now its not possible.

  • Futons
    January 21st, 2010 on 11:57 pm

    I don’t know if I’ll be able to go to sleep tonight now. I’m afraid I’m going to wake up with my mattress giving me a full nelson telling me everything is going to be alright, and to just let the darkness in…

1 Trackback or Pingback for this entry

  • Forget the experts, Nanny (state) knows best! | Morts Musings
    November 6th, 2009 on 11:57 am

    [...] It also quite clearly reveals that the govts objections to cannabis and ectasy seem to come down to “drugs are illegal because they’re bad, and they’re bad because they’re illegal”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that these drugs are 100% harmless, but if an expert, whose job it is to know, is stating that they’re less harmful than substances which are legal and freely available then surely that has to be a pretty good arguement for their legalisation? OK, you could take the opposite tack and say that maybe tobacco and alcohol should be made illegal instead, but apart from being a non-starter in terms of getting the populace to accept such a move, not to mention how much it would cost the exchequer in terms of lost duty, there comes a point where govt has to butt out and let people make their own choices (and take responsibility for them) even if there is some risk involved; Else we’ll eventually end up as a society of joyless wage slaves whose only purpose is to be good little workers. I mean, if you want to start talking about banning anything which is dangerous then lets start by looking at privately owned vehicles; how many deaths and injuries do they cause each year on our roads? By contrast we’re talking about cannabis & ectasy, susbstances which routinely kill less people each year than bed related misadventures! [...]

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