It’s tough to resist a graphic that begins, “Total odds of dying, any cause: 1 in 1.”

The image caught our eye on Digg, where it’s garnered thousands of Diggs and hundreds of comments in the past few days.

A bit of Googling led us to National Geographic, and a few calls led us to Margaret Zackowitz, who edited the section where the item ran in 2006. The editors referred to it as the “death spiral.” We asked her about the image’s recurring waves of Internet stardom.

“You know what it is?” she said. “Everybody’s got to die. You always want to write about what’s going to affect somebody, and nobody gets off the hook for that.”

The graphic is based on 2003 figures from the National Safety Council, a nonprofit group that puts together tables of this stuff based on data from the CDC and the Census Bureau. You can see newer figures and lots more causes of death on the NSC Web site.

Your chances of dying by being “confined to or trapped in a low-oxygen environment,” for example, are one in 271,315. Far more likely (1 in 75,968) is death by “threat to breathing due to cave-in, falling earth and other substances.” Then there are the biggies we write about all the time: heart disease (1 in 5), cancer (1 in 7) and stroke (1 in 24).

Alan Hoskins, manager of the nonprofit group’s statistics department, told us the NSC put together the table years ago, in response to frequent calls (many from reporters) asking whether one cause of death was more common than another. “It’s a subject of interest to a lot of people — what am I likely to die from?” Hoskins told us. “It has a personal connection.”

Image courtesy National Geographic magazine