Like McGrath, I found Vectis' first claim about falling downstairs hard to believe, though I can't offer any statistics to the contrary.

But it seems to me that there's an inherent lack of clarity in such a discussion because you have to decide how much to group similar causes of death together and how much to consider them on their own. I mean, maybe "falling off things" was more common than any one disease, but disease in general would be more common than falling. And there's more than one way for a woman to die in childbirth - that's a grouping too.

I remember seeing a commercial claiming that more Americans die because of cigarettes each year than from drunk driving accidents, murder, and suicide combined. But of course there's more than one way for cigarettes to kill you.

Be careful anyway everybody,
Marion