Selfie deaths have become a health problem that has already claimed the lives of over 250 people in the past six years, according to a recent study.
"The selfie deaths have become a major public health problem," lead author Agam Bansal of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences said, according to The Washington Post.
To arrive at their findings, which were published in the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care, Bansal and his team of researchers compiled an exhaustive list of English newspapers worldwide and ran a search for keywords such as "selfie deaths," "selfie accidents" and "selfie mortality."
They then cross matched those links against the list of newspaper reports they had compiled and discovered that there had been 259 selfie-related deaths occurring between October 2011 to November 2017.
The most common causes of death were drowning, falling and getting killed by public transport while attempting to take a selfie and the highest incidents had occurred in India, Russia, the U.S. and Pakistan.
This is not the first time that light has been shed on the fatal risks of snapping a selfie.
In 2015 Mashable noted that selfie deaths were officially more common than deaths related to shark attacks.
For perspective, there were 12 selfie-related deaths reported that year while there were eight deaths caused by shark attacks.
Addressing these numbers, Bansal and his team recommended that "no selfie zones" be declared at popular tourist areas near water, mountain peaks and tall buildings.
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