ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on reports and papers relating to lightning-caused death and injury for the United States, England and Wales, Singapore, and Australia. Lightning-caused death rates are usually expressed as the number of deaths per million of population per year. For a given country, this death rate usually exhibits significant year to year fluctuations, so averaging over a 5- or 10-year period is appropriate to smooth out short-term fluctuations. From a worldwide viewpoint, there are many countries with large populations for which no reports or papers were available; thus, the available data should be viewed as an imperfect sample from which some deductions about worldwide lightning-caused death and injury rates can be made. Distributions of lightning-caused deaths by age have been provided by Prentice for Australia over the 25-year period 1945 to 1969 and by Chao et al. for Singapore over the 24-year period 1956 to 1979.
