Could poets and writers risk industrial disease for their art?

Every so often, a bit of scientific research comes up that makes my research a joy. While I was supposed to be looking for materials on industrial disease, up popped a piece of information from a legitimate Californian university that showed that the profession of 'poet' is one that carries a greater than usual risk of an early death.

I wonder if this means we can classify the poetic urge as an industrial disease in itself? Or, given the fact that the urge tends to come before a poet does any work on writing the poems, perhaps it's more that the poems are some kind of symptom of a pre-existing condition.

Either way, it's fairly clear there'd be nobody to launch a personal injury claim against - unless, perhaps, the Muse herself. And poets are always complaining about losing their muse, so it's fairly clear she doesn't leave a forwarding address.

Aside from the fun part, there is actually an interesting piece of academic research going on. The researcher, Associate Professor James C Kaufman from California State University, has looked into the life spans of nearly two thousand writers from four different cultures (US, Chinese, Turkish and Eastern European) to produce figures that back up the myth of poets dying young.

His figures show that it's a cross-cultural phenomenon, and that although poets are the likeliest to die young, the tendency is there across all writers. (Playwrights are next likeliest, through fiction, to non-fiction specialists having the best chance of survival.)

These figures are replicated in studies published before and since, so would seem to have a strong claim to truth. I can imagine the next instalment of the Writers and Artists Yearbook having a health and safety entry explicitly discouraging people from moving into the dangerous areas of the literary arts without a hard hat (and tiny ones for the end of their pens).

I suppose you may equally think of accidents at work occurring to writers; papercuts are the first that spring to mind, but all that electrical equipment has the chance of going wrong, let alone the ongoing risks of carpal tunnel syndrome and RSI. These are real industrial diseases that certainly could be contracted by writers even copywriters in a personal injury compensation claim firm. Perhaps that's a good point for me to stop for the week, for my own health.