Choking deaths on food in the US

As more Burmese pythons have been removed from the Florida Everglades, more Americans have choked to death on food, a correlation that suggests either that pythons were somehow preventing choking (perhaps through their well-known ability to swallow things whole without incident) or that Florida's invasive reptile problem and America's eating habits share nothing but a timeline. The coefficient is 0.922 across seventeen years, during which both metrics rose with the steady determination of trends that have no idea they are being compared. The snake constricts, the esophagus constricts, and the data draws a line between them.

Burmese python removal in Florida grew from about 50 per year in the early 2000s to over 1,000 by 2021, reflecting the expansion of organized removal programs (including the Python Elimination Program and the annual Python Challenge) rather than a growth in python population, which is nearly impossible to estimate in the Everglades. Choking deaths on food rose modestly as the US population aged, since choking risk increases significantly after 65. Both trends are institutional responses to long-standing problems: one is the state of Florida slowly organizing to address a decades-old invasive species crisis, the other is the aging of the baby boomer generation creating a larger vulnerable population. They share a direction but not a cause.

Seventeen years of python removals and choking deaths rising together is a correlation that connects the swamp to the dinner table with the comfortable absurdity that keeps this website in business. The pythons are invasive, the food is stationary, and the connection between them is simply two problems that got worse at the same rate. The snake does not choke. The data does not explain.