Regular expressions, help?

[Sania]

Hi,
So I am trying to get the number of casualties in a text. After 'death
toll' in the text the number I need is presented as you can see from
the variable called text. Here is my code
I'm pretty sure my regex is correct, I think it's the group part
that's the problem.
I am using nltk by python. Group grabs the string in parenthesis and
stores it in deadnum and I make deadnum into a list.

 text="accounts put the death toll at 637 and those missing at
653 , but the total number is likely to be much bigger"
      dead=re.match(r".*death toll.*(\d[,\d\.]*)", text)
      deadnum=dead.group(1)
      deaths.append(deadnum)
      print deaths

Any help would be appreciated,
Thank you,
Sania