I have always suspected the hype and fear about shark attacks was mondo
exaggerated, so when the recent epidemic of anecdotally-feuled shark
mania struck the list recently, i joined Shark-L and asked for some hard
facts about attack frequency.  The "definitive" shark-attack-stat site
is: http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/sharks/statistics/statistics.htm, run
by The Florida Museum of Natural History.
         To summarize very briefly, less than 1800 shark attack reports
worldwide have surfaced in this century, and the modern-day average is
~50 per year, with about 10 fatalities (versus over 10 times that many
lightning stirkes, for comparison, and millions of premature fatalities
attributable to smoking).  About half of them occur in Florida, due to
the massive tourist influx and local water-related activity (although
fatalities there are extremely rare!).  45% happen to surfers,
expecially those wearing wet-suits (making them look like seals or
sea-lions!), the remainder being more or less split between swimmers and
divers.  Great Whites are by far the most frequent offenders, with
Tiger, bull, Sand-tiger and Requiem sharks lagging far behind, and all
other species' contributions being rather trivial (hammerhead spp 6th,
and  the oft-maligned lemon shark, only 13th!). Interestingly enough,
about 2/3 are "unprovoked".
        So, let's do some quick-and-dirty safety-calculations: say a billion
people go swimming, diving or surfing in the worldwide ocean each year,
and say they go in about 15 times each.  That makes the odds of bieng
attacked by a shark 50 in 15 billion, or about 1 in 300 million each
time you go in, and your chances of getting killed are less than 1 in a
billion.  Each time you go for an automobile ride or smoke a single
ciggarette, you have about a one in a million chance of ending up dead
as a result: so going for a swim in the sea is over 1000 times as
dangerous as lighting one up, or picking up a quart of milk at the
corner store.

        I am NOT worried.

Cheers,
Ross.

P.S.: And forget about cover-ups: shark-attacks are so rare and
spectacular that they are "Big News", and more than a bit difficult to
hide from the ravenously-hungry-for-sensational-stories press!!