False, but not misleading
An infographic tweeted by Bill Gates recently on the world’s deadliest animals
He’s trying to make the point that malaria is a really big deal, killing more people than human violence, which is true, and which is the impression from the infographic, so it’s not misleading in that sense.
However, mosquitos don’t rend people limb from limb. The mosquito deaths are due to mosquitos infecting people with malaria parasites. The human deaths, however, are just directly due to violence. If he’d included deaths due to human-human transmission of infection (influenza, tuberculosis, HIV, …), humans would easily be at the top of the list again.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »