In a sense, EHS professionals are in the business of making educated bets. They assess workplace hazards, analyze injury trends and prioritize where they should direct the most energy and resources, in hopes of eliminating the hazards that they deem to pose the most risk to worker safety and health.
If all of their bets pay off, workers are able to complete their job tasks without incident or injury. But even a betting man can’t deny that there’s a 100 percent chance that all of us will die someday – whether it’s on or off the job.
The 2014 edition of the National Safety Council’s Injury Facts crunches data from the National Center for Health Statistics, the World Health Organization and the U.S. Census Bureau to calculate the lifetime odds of dying from various causes. If anything, perhaps the data might convince a few people to quit smoking – or at the very least allay their fears of being struck by lightning.