I'm sure it wasn't scaled or normalized at all. It's global annual deaths.
It would be interesting to see what percentage of annual premature deaths they account for in countries with any deaths.
Ie lions and hippos are presumably a much large percentage of annual premature deaths in countries where there are any lion and hippo deaths, whereas mosquito deaths happen in many more countries, and homicides in basically all countries.
I'm actually quite shocked by the number of lion and hippo deaths.
"Dogs are responsible for around 30,000 human deaths per year, with the vast majority of these deaths resulting from rabies that is transmitted from the dog."
That’s in countries with good vaccination programs for pets, good animal control, and the money to keep it going.
Poor countries have a big feral/stray dog problem and no money to try to vaccinate or spay/neuter-release the animals to try to deal with it.
Yes, rabies is very rare in the US, and the top exposures to rabies for this country are Bats, Raccoons, Skunks and Foxes. And of course: don’t mess with wild animals acting strangely, if you find a bat in your (or your kids) bedroom, follow your local health board requirements which may necessitate the capture of the bat and/or getting rabies vaccines.
So, most assassin bugs are actually be beneficial insects. It's a large group of true bugs, and most of them feed on other invertebrates.
As a@athairmor pointed out there are some types that feed on human blood and spread potentially deadly diseases. But these are the exceptions.
You should be concerned if you live in areas where the parasite carrying types live.
And you should be concerned if you are harassing/handling other types of assassin bug because many of them have very painful "stings" (it's not actually a sting it's their version of a bite, since they have needle like mouths they can use to jab in defense). So long as you leave those types alone, you generally won't end up on their list.
The freshwater snails are hosts, much like mosquitos in this diagram. They host platyhelminthes. The ascaris and tapeworms are also helminths. As far as I know anyway. I can understand that they wanted to show animals in the diagram because you can actually avoid those but avoiding the snails won't actually help because the worms infect by being excreted by the snail and infecting another host(human or other), usually in water.
