One of the greatest public health successes, that is often unheralded, has been the massive decline in smoking rates, which are now translating into reduced deaths from cancer and heart disease.
In fact, considering that we spend more time dead than alive - we may live to be 100 but we are classified as "dead" forever after - it is perhaps a more natural state.
The study'ssenior author, William Hamilton, a medical examiner in Florida, concluded that these burns occurred post-mortem and that death wasindeed instantaneous.
One dog has been killed and multiple dogs have been injured by a snowmobile driver in what appears to be an intentional attack on competitors in the Iditarod Race in Alaska.
A study by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters finds that between 1980 and 2007, nearly 8,400 natural disasters killed more than two million people.