An Informed Traveler Is a Safer Traveler"There's a lot going on in the world," said Daniel Durazo, director of communications at Allianz Global Assistance USA, which sells travel insurance. "There's a lot of noise out there about the dangers of traveling."
Yet we're generally terrible at adjusting the volume.
"How scared or not you are is an emotion, not a statistic," said David Ropeik, a risk consultant and the author of "How Risky Is It, Really?" As fans of haunted houses will attest, risk and being scared are two different things. But Mr. Ropeik's point is that in the battle between your gut and your brain, your gut will win. One way to make sensible choices as a traveler is to nudge your gut toward rationality by feeding it accurate information, which is easier said than done.
Zika and terrorism are the latest high-decibel threats. But there are also some deafening silences. For example, you hear very little about the leading cause of nonnatural deaths among Americans abroad: motor vehicle accidents.
According to the latest figures available from the State Department, 223 Americans died abroad in car, bus or motorcycle accidents between July 2014 and June 2015. Other causes of death (homicide, suicide and drowning) also far outweigh terrorism. Sixteen Americans died of "terrorist action" in that period, all but four in places you already know not to go: Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and Somalia.
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