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By Monica Garske, AOL News
Soccer fans may have wanted to kill themselves at the 2010 World Cup this summer because of the incessant buzz of those annoying South African vuvuzuelas, but who knew the noisy stadium horns could actually kill?
Acording to SPIKE TV's "1000 Ways To Die," an offbeat series about weird causes of death and freak accidents that begins its third season this September, "death by vuvuzuela" is actually possible.
Series creator Thom Beers, the man behind such TV hits as "Deadliest Catch" and "Monster Garage" told AOL News that producers throroughly reseached the vuvuzuela with a team of medical experts. The noisemaker did, in all seriousness, turn out to be potentitally deadly.
Now, don't blow the whistle on Beers' crazy claim just yet. His theroretical case of death by the horn makes more sense than it sounds. And it doesn't include "people cutting their own wrists" to avoid hearing the bothersome horns or any "bleeding from the ears," he said.
The episode, dubbed "Feelin' Horny", charts the demise of a soccer fanatic who dies of a brain aneurysm caused by the stress of blowing a vuvuzuela non stop.
Still sound like a load of bull?
Well, according to Dr. Pavel Bindra, a cardiac electrophysiologist who practices out of Arcadia, California, it's not.
Bindra told AOL news the strange scenario is entirely possible because blowing too hard on a horn for a long period of time, say a 90-minute soccer match, would cause an increase in pressure on the blood vessels.
He said that could lead to high blood pressure and the development of an aneurysm, which "inflates like a balloon on a blood vessel and can eventually pop".
Still, accidental death by a noisemaker isn't really all that far fetched when you look at the statisticis of unintentional injuries and deaths in the US each year.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of unintentional injuries stemming from all causes was 27,877,748 in 2008 alone.
In 2007, the CDC noted 123,706 accidental deaths from unitentional injuries, which accounted for 5.1 percent of all meetings with the Grim Reaper that year.
With stats like those, it's now wonder Beers has tapped into freak accidents as fodder for television.
This season, he teased that the show will be exploring the weirdest and wildest death scenarios to date, including a self-liposuction gone wrong, a woman with massive breast implants who gets struck by lightning, and (the) seriously strange death of escape artist Harry Houndini.
But no matter how kooky the "ways to die" are, Beers is confident the viewers will relate.
"Everyone has had an 'Oh, S**t' moment when they regret whatever dumb move they just made. That moment where you know you're about to get
hurt. That's what this show is based on."
In the end, Beers believes the leadiing cause of accidental death is "stupidity" because those who die in weird ways are usually attempting to take a careless shortcut or "cheat the system" to make their life easier in some way.
"If you play life by the numbers, it works," he said. "It's when you throw a wrench in the mix that things begin to crumble."
And though Beers admits the smartest strategy in life is probably to play it safe, he also wonders "What's the fun in that?"
Ultimately, he believes the motto "If you're not living on the edge, then you're taking up too much room" is a good saying to live by--or, as fate would sometimes have it, to die by.
Soccer fans may have wanted to kill themselves at the 2010 World Cup this summer because of the incessant buzz of those annoying South African vuvuzuelas, but who knew the noisy stadium horns could actually kill?
Acording to SPIKE TV's "1000 Ways To Die," an offbeat series about weird causes of death and freak accidents that begins its third season this September, "death by vuvuzuela" is actually possible.
Series creator Thom Beers, the man behind such TV hits as "Deadliest Catch" and "Monster Garage" told AOL News that producers throroughly reseached the vuvuzuela with a team of medical experts. The noisemaker did, in all seriousness, turn out to be potentitally deadly.
Now, don't blow the whistle on Beers' crazy claim just yet. His theroretical case of death by the horn makes more sense than it sounds. And it doesn't include "people cutting their own wrists" to avoid hearing the bothersome horns or any "bleeding from the ears," he said.
The episode, dubbed "Feelin' Horny", charts the demise of a soccer fanatic who dies of a brain aneurysm caused by the stress of blowing a vuvuzuela non stop.
Still sound like a load of bull?
Well, according to Dr. Pavel Bindra, a cardiac electrophysiologist who practices out of Arcadia, California, it's not.
Bindra told AOL news the strange scenario is entirely possible because blowing too hard on a horn for a long period of time, say a 90-minute soccer match, would cause an increase in pressure on the blood vessels.
He said that could lead to high blood pressure and the development of an aneurysm, which "inflates like a balloon on a blood vessel and can eventually pop".
Still, accidental death by a noisemaker isn't really all that far fetched when you look at the statisticis of unintentional injuries and deaths in the US each year.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of unintentional injuries stemming from all causes was 27,877,748 in 2008 alone.
In 2007, the CDC noted 123,706 accidental deaths from unitentional injuries, which accounted for 5.1 percent of all meetings with the Grim Reaper that year.
With stats like those, it's now wonder Beers has tapped into freak accidents as fodder for television.
This season, he teased that the show will be exploring the weirdest and wildest death scenarios to date, including a self-liposuction gone wrong, a woman with massive breast implants who gets struck by lightning, and (the) seriously strange death of escape artist Harry Houndini.
But no matter how kooky the "ways to die" are, Beers is confident the viewers will relate.
"Everyone has had an 'Oh, S**t' moment when they regret whatever dumb move they just made. That moment where you know you're about to get
hurt. That's what this show is based on."
In the end, Beers believes the leadiing cause of accidental death is "stupidity" because those who die in weird ways are usually attempting to take a careless shortcut or "cheat the system" to make their life easier in some way.
"If you play life by the numbers, it works," he said. "It's when you throw a wrench in the mix that things begin to crumble."
And though Beers admits the smartest strategy in life is probably to play it safe, he also wonders "What's the fun in that?"
Ultimately, he believes the motto "If you're not living on the edge, then you're taking up too much room" is a good saying to live by--or, as fate would sometimes have it, to die by.
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