The odds of getting killed by a shark in Australia

Australia has the highest rate of shark attacks in the world but our fears of a grisly death at sea should be the least of our worries.

The video above shows the history of shark deaths in Australia in the last 200 years and compares it to the startling number of deaths caused per year by other dangers.

Last year two people in Australia were killed in shark attacks, more than any other country in 2014, according to a report from the University of Florida's Museum of Natural History.

But George Burgess, one of their curator's said steady attack numbers are “often lost in the resultant media feeding frenzy”.

“It's amazing, given the billions of hours humans spend in the water, how uncommon attacks are”, he said.

In response to last year’s shark attacks, the Western Australia Government introduced a controversial catch and kill policy.

Australia's first documented fatal shark attack was in 1791 according to Shark Attack File, an online database of world-wide shark attacks.

As seen in the infographic above, Australia's population sky-rocketed over the next 150 years but shark-related incidents remained relatively constant.

After the 1930s, a slow decline in unprovoked incidents per decade was measured due to shark management practices that were put into place.

Nowadays, Australia has about one death per year on average due to sharks.

You can see how annual shark deaths relate to other fatalities across Australia in the video above.