About 24,000 people are killed by lightning strikes around the world each year.

Lightning strikes can produce severe injuries, and are lethal in between 10 and 30% of cases, with up to 80% of survivors sustaining long-term injuries. These severe injuries are not usually caused by thermal burns, since the current is too brief to greatly heat up tissues; instead, nerves and muscles may be directly damaged by the high voltage producing holes in their cell membranes, a process called electroporation.

Image credit: Filip.vidinovski/Wikimedia Commons
Source: wikipedia.org/wiki…