Derek Andrews
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According to the Dept of Labor you are most likely to die or sustain serious injury if you work in the Timber and Logging industries.
Followed by those jolly people on their fishing boats in the Bering Sea and elsewhere. (Don't bother guys, I HATE fish).
The remaining members of this exclusive Top Ten Band of Brothers are listed below. Visions of Roofers sliding down a steep roof into a toxic cess-pit or a Farmer jogging home with the refrain "Honey, I just chopped off both arms in the threshing machine" come hauntingly to mind.
- Pilots and navigators
- Structural metal workers
- Drivers-sales workers
- Roofers
- Electrical power installers
- Farm occupations
- Construction laborers
- Truck drivers
Perhaps at #11 ought to be occupants of English Victorian terraced houses with basements, considering that the writer fell down his basement steps a year ago.
However, the nicely laid out figures and graphs of insurance actuaries in Italy have taken a battering recently and they are now having to accept that GATHERING MUSHROOMS can be seriously detrimental to ones health, as the accompanying linked article shows.
At least 18 people have died in just 10 days as fungaioli, as this intrepid bunch are known (were known?) get up pre-dawn, camouflage themselves and trek off into wild countryside with a lamp secured to their head. Strangely they often forget to wear appropriate footwear for the tough terrain. This can cause problems. Trust me and cross-reference with writers mishap outlined earlier.
In trying to be first to get back to the markets and restaurant kitchens, where anxious owners and traders wait with zillions of Lira bills to swap for the prized specimens, they often fall down cliffs, get impaled on goat horns (well no, I made that last bit up but you get the idea) or just disappear. Failing to keep an optical prescription up to date may well be a contributing factor according to Herr Dirk Andrusz, a world expert on the subject.
So the moral is this mio amici italiani, stick to pasta, or just pop down to McDonalds for a mushroom burger and let someone else risk their life out there in the wild flora and fauna looking for the elusive fungi.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/29/italian-mountain-mushrooms-claim-lives
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