Interesting links thank you - although I am still not convinced of the need to know and it does sound a bit paranoid.
For a much older, or used camera - I grant that it could give an useful indication of when to start looking for a new camera - but one of the articles say a survey of users shutter counts showed a camera could average 130K activations but the range was around 50K to 200K. For some reason the Canon 450D seemed to average only 30K actuations!
Thanks for the link. I just bought a refurbished D3100 and was curious how "used" it was- the shutter count was only 4879. And your web site agreed with nitrophils web site