A Rash Of Senicide? 

 There have been an awful lot of stories lately about the world's oldest person dying; in fact, it seems to have happened about  three times  in the last month or so. Then again, being the world's oldest person is a dubious honour to be sure, since the winner isn't likely to hold the title for very long and likely isn't even aware of their status. (Full disclosure: my great-grandmother was a centenarian but likely never knew my name.) 

 These stories have been bouncing in my mind lately and I'm trying to figure out why. I can think of a few scientifically relevant explanations: 

 1) The life expectancy of a centenarian is on the order of a year, and three successive deaths in a month is a rare event; conditioned on the first one, assuming independence and exponential life span (a reasonable assumption for the tail end), the probability of the next two events coming within a month is roughly 0.0033. And this happened to be the month for it. 

 2) The events aren't at all rare, and the centenarian death rate is actually dramatically higher, but it's a slow news month, and the stories themselves are floating to the top of the pile. 

 3) Online news services like  Reuters  and  CNN  have dedicated spaces for more `entertaining' and `bizarre' news stories, meaning that no matter how much news there is, people are seeing these stories. 

 4) Guinness sales are down, despite the "brilliant!" advertising campaign, and the World Record people are seeking out these changing events for the sake of their own discreet advertising. 

 5) I read  this in The Onion  and the satire hit me point blank, meaning I'm selecting and remembering the stories more often when they appear. 

 I'm thinking it's Number 5, but I'd be curious to know if anyone knew the mean centenarian death rate and whether this was a rare occurrence or not.