Over 2500 left-handed people a year are killed from using equipment made for right-handed people.

February 4, 2010

Unverifiable - now, one would expect this data would be relatively easy to come by, statistics are collected on all sorts of accidents [pdf]. A quick (by quick we mean: more time than we intended to spend) internet search reveals a lot of results from fact-aggregating web sites that list this claim as fact almost verbatim. Unfortunately none of these sites provide any statistics, sources of statistics, or even sources that actually have data of what they are attributed to having (some sites claim one organization or another has the data, upon investigation, they don’t) to back up these claims. Part of what makes this so hard to quantify or verify is that until relatively recently left-handedness had been widely (and sometimes forcefully) discouraged, there are still many people today that were painstakingly “retrained” into right-handed dominance. We’re certainly not saying left-handed fatalities due to right-handed instruments don’t occur, but there doesn’t seem to be enough data to back this claim up; so we’ll put this one in the unsubstantiated rumor category, for now.

original claim: @OMGFacts; sources: can’t find any.

1:36pm | URL: http://omgfactcheck.tumblr.com/post/370874185/over-2500-left-handed-people-a-year-are-killed-from

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